loading grub from disk using qemu

[Shaun]

I'm revisiting a old mailing list question I posted that I really never 
got to work the way I wanted it too and I ended up abandoning what I was 
doing as my time was needed elsewhere.  here's the original post link

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-grub/2017-02/msg00001.html

I do have a better understanding of building a grub kernel image and I 
am able to get grub to load from the qemu instances disk.  The scenario 
is the same, I'm looking to load grub from a disk with no partitioning, 
so hd0. I'm still confused if I can load grub from the disk image.  Not 
just the config file but actually load grub and it's modules from that 
disk.  The main module I need these days is the blscfg module. I am able 
to build an image, use it and run configfile /boot/grub/grub.cfg and 
then if I drop into a shell do insmod blscfg and load that module 
however what I feel is probably happening is that my grub image is just 
loading that module from the disk which seams to work but my concern 
here is that the modules on that disk may of been built for a different 
version of grub depending on the distro.  For example redhat based 
distros tend to be way behind on the version of grub used. So my first 
question is if that is even possible, or if maybe I'm just not fully 
understanding how grub works.

In my previous tests the big issue was that virtio devices was not 
supported in grub and biosdisk was very slow.  I recently figured out 
how to correct this by building my own seabios with virtio support and 
using that bios by passing it to qemu with -bios.

I did notice that seabios talks about being able to load grub as a rom 
but have found little info on how to do that and i'm not even sure 
that's the right direction to go.

All I want to do, is have qemu use grub from the disk just as it would 
on a bare metal system.

Quick final question, do you plan to bring add blscfg into the grub 
source?  Is there an official patch someplace? The random patches I keep 
finding look to just be ripped from a few different variations of RHEL 
based packages.

--
Shaun Reitan