partition layouts

[Hollis Blanchard]

I've been thinking about how to install grub2 on an Open Firmware 
system. Here's one possibility:
        /boot -- Linux-native filesystem (e.g. ext3)
                holds kernels, initrd, etc
	/boot/grub -- firmware-native filesystem (on Mac HFS+, on others FAT, 
etc)
                holds grub executable, grub.cfg, modules

The grub ELF file must live on a firmware-native filesystem. When run, 
it can find out what partition it was booted from, so that is a natural 
place to load grub.cfg from as well (and why not modules while we're at 
it?). Thus this is the value of the "prefix" GRUB environment variable.

When booting kernels from another partition though, we're left with 
something like this:
        title Linux
                linux (hd,7)/vmlinux-foo root=/dev/hda12
                initrd (hd,7)/initrd-foo

[To summarize:
(hd,5) -- /boot/grub
(hd,7) -- /boot
(hd,11) -- /
]

Can we have a shortcut to avoid specifying that "(hd,7)/" part 
repeatedly? I think that was the "root" command in GRUB Legacy, which 
was replaced by the "prefix" environment variable? But as I mentioned, 
"prefix" doesn't have the meaning we're looking for here...

The other possibility is to have all of /boot as a firmware-native 
filesystem. I think that's not ideal though, because those filesystems 
(HFS+, FAT) might not support features like symlinks or Unix-style 
permissions, or may not be as well-tested as Linux-native filesystems.

-Hollis