Sparc bootblock [Was: SFS breaks PPC build ]

[Bart Grantham]

Marco Gerards wrote:

> As GRUB 2 is ported to the ultra sparc64 it might be wise for us (GRUB
> and solaris developers) to talk about multiboot.  Of course other
> parties might be interested as well (the Hurd uses multiboot, for
> example).
>
> Anyway, what is important for you is that we are thinking about a
> portable multiboot and that there is also a sparc port in the making.

Speaking of which, after refreshing my forth skills, I've started work 
on the sparc bootloader.  I have it reading data from disk into mem, but 
I'm not sure if I want to share it quite yet.  Before sharing it I'd 
like to:

- have it verify that the file at the configured sector(s) is an ELF file
- follow through and make sure it properly boots an ELF image (right now 
it only gets it into memory)
- clean up the code a bunch

I'll hand it over once I get those done.  After that, the features I'd 
like to work on are:

- support of a sector-sized lookup table indicating the layout of the 
grub image on disk, allowing for more flexible configuration
- support of a sector-sized lookup table indicating additional forth 
bytecode, providing for extensibility just in case.
- verify that the code works on PPC, and if not, try to make it work so 
that there's a unified bootblock [not sure if this is reasonable as I'm 
not as familiar with how PPC OF boots... how similiar is it to Sparc?]
- same for sparc32

BG