OSDev.org

ive been following the list lately.. just wondering if anyone else has been paying attention to the development of grub2?

it seems to me, with all they are trying to cram in, theyd be better off using something like a mini linux/microbsd/picobsd kernel than trrying to rewrite an mini-os just to act as a bootloader.

im sure the fat and gristle can be trimmed from some of these kernels to keep enough functionality for a bootloader. tcp stack, usb stack, scsi, etc, pluggable filesystems, etc.

it just seems they are tryng to cram a lot into it all over again. grub WAS in dire need of a rewrite but I wonder if they are trying to go too far...

what concerns me is they abandoned grub before getting to a 1.0, after it sat at 0.9x for a long long long time. is there commitment to grub?

i still havnt seen them post a multiboot2 spec, it gets talked about a lot but none of the rough edges in spec1 were ever cleaned up etc...

df wrote:it seems to me, with all they are trying to cram in, theyd be better off using something like a mini linux/microbsd/picobsd kernel than trrying to rewrite an mini-os just to act as a bootloader.

Heh. I asked about other Multiboot bootloaders a while back because I'm working on one myself. Mind you, I love GRUB, it's the operating system all of my computers boot first. ;D But for some purposes I really just need a bootloader, and the Multiboot spec isn't so complex that you really need an entire operating system to implement it...

I made contact with 'em (as the mailing list archives might testify) voicing some concern of my own over GRUB 2 and the maintenance of 0.9x.

The reply, in short, was "people worry too much about version numbers". I won't argue the fine print (I think version numbers *are* important), but they said they'll continue to fix bugs in 0.9x.

That being said, I welcome the effort to make GRUB available on other platforms, but all in all I think the GRUB team suffers from a severe case of scope creep.

How close is grub2 to being semi complete and what benefits are there to us os developers and our hobby os's?

srg

Question 1: The "official" answer was "look at the CVS". Since I have better things to do than to judge the maturity of some project by what's in their code repository, I consider GRUB 2 to be non-existent.

Question 2: If you're writing an OS for IA32 (aka x86), and use GRUB 0.9x as a bootloader already, probably not much. I was told there'd be no changes necessary to existing Multiboot-compliant kernels. An interesting thing, though, is the point on making Multiboot specs (and loaders) for other platforms, too.

Solar wrote: Question 1: The "official" answer was "look at the CVS". Since I have better things to do than to judge the maturity of some project by what's in their code repository, I consider GRUB 2 to be non-existent.

Question 2: If you're writing an OS for IA32 (aka x86), and use GRUB 0.9x as a bootloader already, probably not much. I was told there'd be no changes necessary to existing Multiboot-compliant kernels. An interesting thing, though, is the point on making Multiboot specs (and loaders) for other platforms, too.

A multiboot loader for the Amiga would be brilliant!

srg