On Tuesday 01 May 2007 22:10, Robert Millan wrote: > What is the recommended way for binary distributors of GRUB to support > PC/BIOS and EFI at the same time? Is it possible to build a mixed binary > that supports both systems somehow? (and if it isn't, are there plans or > ongoing work for that?)
I don't think so. The size restriction is too severe for PC BIOS. One possibility is to bundle binary images both for PC BIOS and EFI in a package, and selectively use one of them by grub-install. But this has a serious issue, on a EFI platform which supports Legacy Boot, because the user can use both. Personally, I think it is much cleaner to use just EFI on EFI platforms instead of Legacy Boot. But this depends on a preference... For now, I have no good idea. > Also, which are the cpu platforms that may use EFI? From what I could > find, it seems that: > > - ia32 doesn't have it You forgot about Intel Mac. :) In fact, my Mac Mini is with Intel Core Solo, which definitely does not support 64-bit. > - ia64 always has it > - amd64 only has it on Intel-Macs, and will have it on more devices in > the future Do Intel Mac have AMD processors, or do you mean EM64T? If you just mean IA-32 architecture with 64-bit extensions (both Intel's and AMD's), the canonical name in GNU is "x86_64". > Am I missing something? No idea. In theory, nothing prevents porting EFI to other architectures. Wikipedia mentions XScale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_Interface Okuji _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
