Re: [PATCH] grub2 for Cygwin

[Christian Franke]

Pavel Roskin wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-04-03 at 21:56 +0200, Christian Franke wrote:
>
>   
> > OK, if there is no chance to get this accepted, grub2 project managers 
> > should tell me soon.
> >     
>
> I'm not a project manager, but I would hate to see useful code
> discarded.
>   

:-)


> I think the ability to install GRUB from Windows would allow creating
> installers for Windows that install a free OS without reboots and would
> not rely on booting from any media other than the hard drive.  I think a
> non-Cygwin port would be preferred for that, but Cygwin could be a
> useful stepping stone, a testbed and the build environment for the
> native port.
>
>   

Yes, it actually is. I also use cygwin to build the non-Cygwin packages 
for my other Windows ports (smartmontools, hdparm).

Cygwin's "kernel" is essentially a dll which emulates a Linux/POSIX API. 
The GRUB2 cygwin binaries need only the following files to run OOTB from 
Windows cmd.exe:
cygwin1.dll
cyglzo2-2.dll
cygncurses-8.dll (grub-emu only)
terminfo/c/cygwin (grub-emu only)

The shell scripts would require additional files from bash and 
coreutils, of course.

> ...
> Maybe we could start with simple changes that don't make the code
> significantly more complex?
>   

OK, then I would suggest to (re)start with the small change for 
grub-mkdevicemap.

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2007-12/msg00179.html

The patch is still current and already got positive feedback from Marco 
and Robert.
I can also repost it, if desired.


> I think it would be nice to have a universal infrastructure for all
> platforms that would use linker scripts instead of strip and objcopy on
> all platforms.
>   

objcopy has to be used if the native object format on a platform is not 
(the) ELF (variant the grub loader expects).

Unfortunately, libbfd is apparently not designed to support conversion 
of relocation info.


> Perhaps you could clone git://repo.or.cz/grub2.git and keep the patches
> in your local copy?

OK, added this as remote to my repo.


>   The great thing about git is that it relieves the
> urgency of merges, as the changes can be held as separate patches and
> rebased to the current tree as needed.
>
>   

BTW: Thanks to the clean upstream changes, merging from CVS was never a 
problem since I started the Cygwin port in oct 2007.


> > The cygwin port of grub2 is targeted to users who want a *n[iu]x 
> > environment, but (have to) use Windows as main work OS for whatever 
> > reason. They likely have already installed cygwin :-)
> >     
>
> Why would they benefit from GRUB?  Just wondering.
>
>   

The ability to maintain the boot manger and create rescue discs from 
Cygwin shell without reboot is useful.
(There were some requests for a Cygwin release in the past, e.g: 
http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?20497)

Christian