Hi, I'm in the process of porting some old "OS" I made to take advantage of GRUB's features. There are 2 things I currently need, for which I have partial solutions. But your master advice would be really wellcome!
I need to load a big module (20Megs). This is no problem for GRUB, I can do it currently, but to test everything I'm using vmware and (now) an ISO image with eltorito (using stage2_eltorito from ubuntu's GRUB 0.95). I can also do it with and 0.97 I compiled. I also need to set the video mode before jumping to my kernel. Here's where the main problem comes in. I know I could do it if the multiboot part for this was finished in grub, and I'm willing to implement this support for grub (at least some partial support). This shouldn't be complicated after all the code GRUB already has for VBE support (both in Legacy and grub2). Now, I have two different problems: I can use vbeprobe and testvbe from ubuntu's 0.95. However, if I compile my own grub (either 0.95 with ubuntu's patches or stock 0.97) vbe doesn't really work. I get an empty list of available modes with vbeprobe, and an error message saying that 0xffffff00 is not a valid video mode. I don't know what's causing this. Ignoring this fact, I hacked a new command: setvbe that does what testvbe does, but doesn't exit the video mode nor waits a keypress. This is my first attempt at coding multiboot support for video mode selection. I also tried using GRUB2 for this, and found that I can set the video mode using "terminal vesafb" after doing "set vbe_mode=0x141" for example. This will change the video mode, and then continue with GRUB, letting me boot my "OS" without switching back to the original video mode (exactly what I need). However, I didn't find how to make an ISO image with GRUB2 (allowing me to load a 20MB module, which evidently doesn't feet in a floppy image :-) I have a few questions, any would solve my problem, but some will not let me implement video mode selection for multiboot. How do I do an ISO image with GRUB2? (a la stage2_eltorito)? How do I compile GRUB Legacy with vbe support? (any configuration trick?) How do I debug GRUB Legacy so I can find what the problem with vbe is? Do you think it's worth implementing the multiboot video mode selection for GRUB? thanks a lot gera PS: I read most GRUB's code looking for multiboot video mode selection code, but I couldn't find it. If it's there, please tell me how to use it! PS: When I say multiboot video mode selection I mean what's specified in http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/multiboot/multiboot.html#Header%20graphics%20fields _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
