Re: Replacing the legacy "map" command

[Javier Martín]

Bit a bit, progress continues: I have some crappy UI semi-ready, to
improve on later, and I'm now battling with the INT13h handler to
perform the actual mapping - had to rescue the big old "Architecture
Programmer's Manual" in order to do PIC code without the amd64
rip-relative addressing. However, I haven't yet found a way to install
some kind of "hook" so that it will be called when the boot command is
issued, preferable just before calling grub_X_real_boot. However, I
didn't go to great lengths to find it... Anyone here willing to
enlighten me or should I find my own way through the darkness (again
¬¬)? I'd like to change/add the smallest amount of code possible, but
for the sake of modularity I prefer a pre-boot hook system rather than
a one-time solution.

Habbit

2008/5/30 Pavel Roskin <address@hidden>:
> Quoting Javier Martín <address@hidden>:
>
>> Then "drivemap" it is. I've already been delving into the depths of The
>> Source, though I'd have preferred it to be commented a bit more
>> exhaustively. Some times it's difficult to guess which methods to call,
>> and it took me a bit to realize that I had to check with the disk
>> "device" to see if it was a BIOS drive. Seems I had the wrong conception
>> of what the disk "device" should be.
>
> I suggest a simple approach starting from what can be done.  There will be a
> small resident piece of code installed to intercept interrupt 0x13 and
> replace the driver number according to the map.  We should keep that code
> simple.
>
> The resident code should go through the list of the mapped drives, and if
> there is an entry in the table, replace the drive number.  That's two bytes
> for an entry.
>
> I think the user interface should operate directly on that unidirectional
> map rather that with some complex swap rules that are translated to the map.
>  Sure, it won't be nice if some device is seen as two devices, especially if
> the OS uses BIOS.  But GRUB cannot prevent all stupid actions by users.
>
>> By the way, floppies are usually also "BIOS drives". Should the command
>> filter them out as sources for mapping? I think so, because OS loaders
>> usually have different code for reading floppies and HDs. Concretely,
>> floppy code usually makes some assumptions about drive geometry, uses
>> only old CHS-like interfaces, and some things more I cannot remember
>> now... it's been long since I wrote anything distantly similar to a
>> bootloader.
>
> We may still want to map a hard drive as a floppy.  I can imagine that some
> floppy readers may be seen as hard drives by the BIOS.
>
> I think it's not the most important thing at the moment.  If there is a
> substantial risk of data corruption due to floppy-to-hdd remapping or
> duplicate drives, we can introduce extra safety checks.
>
> --
> Regards,
> Pavel Roskin
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Grub-devel mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
>