Grub2 finally fixed for ELF64

[AlfaOmega08]

Well, I'm not a grub2 developer/mantainer/whatever, just a angry user (until now). Basically when loading an ELF64 with multiboot2 (probably multiboot too) grub2 just returned an error about some sections. So to load an ELF64 you had to put the an Address Tag and an Entry Point Tag, just how we did for the AOUT_KLUDGE in grub legacy. This wasn't working all the time too.

It has finally been fixed! You still won't find a release (the official stable version 1.99 do not include the fix), but you have to dowload the source code from bazaar. Just because I have some spare time now, I'll tell you what to do (you need some packages first):

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sudo apt-get install bison flex autogen
bzr branch http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/r/grub/trunk/grub
cd grub
chmod +x autogen.sh
./autogen.sh
./configure
make all -j4
sudo make install

Then you should use

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grub-mkrescue --output=file.iso iso

to create your iso file (remember the grub.cfg in /boot/grub, and double check braces).

And that's it. You can now get rid of that ugly Address Tag

Hope you find this useful.

[brain]

This is great news how long do you think till it appears in a stable release? Would simplify osdev on 64 bit a lot...

[Qeroq]

Due to that bug I had switched to the multiboot 1 module of grub2, that happened to be able to read my ELF64 kernel binaries. Good to hear this bug has finally been fixed, I'm looking forward to give it a try after finishing the A level exams...