Re: Low-level documentation

[Andrey Borzenkov]

В Sat, 12 Apr 2014 05:28:04 +0200 (CEST)
Fredrik Tolf <address@hidden> пишет:

> Dear list,
> 
> Grub 1 is obviously long dead by now, but one thing I always liked about 
> it was how transparent much of its low-level workings was. It made it easy 
> to make it work on systems that were broken in strange ways or where I had 
> to work under weird circumstances.
> 
> Grub 2, on the other hand, seems to try to go the "user-friendly" way, 
> with `grub-install' wanting to do all the work for me. This is fine, I 
> guess, so long as the circumstances aren't too strange for it to work.
> 

Could you describe your configuration where grub-install fails?

> What bothers me particularly is the actual installation step itself. 
> Building a core image and all seems documented enough, but the 
> `grub-bios-setup' utility isn't even so much as mentioned in the Texinfo 
> manual, and even less so what it actually does, in detail. Is there any 
> available information on this anywhere?
> 

grub-bios-setup mostly corresponds to "install" command of grub legacy.
It tries to embed core.img into either post-MBR gap or reserved area on
partition if filesystem is known to have one. It the worst case it
gives you a rope to use file on filesystem directly. In all cases it
installs boot block (MBR or PBR) which points to the installed
core.img. That's all.