Hello, all. GRUB has supported OLPC for quite some time but I don't know if there are any remaining users. Given how small the intersection between geeks and XO-1 owners nowadays is, continuing support is problematic. Among other things it's likely to degrade over time unless at least minimum maintainance is done. AFAIK none of the active GRUB maintainers even possesses one. The current regular testing is limited to checking whether it builds. The underlying OLPC ieee1275 firmware implementation OFW supposedly supports also qemu and coreboot. While it's still somewhat functional in qemu, it lacks important drivers for modern system when booted with coreboot, most notably AHCI. Some basic automated testing can be performed with OFW on qemu. They currently aren't, another gap needed to fill. Half of the drivers for OLPC aren't included in this OFW-qemu, each of them with specific interface. As a matter of fact we have some workarounds enabled for real OLPC which are not needed in qemu but without them GRUB would hang on real machine. I don't know if they still work. So tests on qemu are better than nothing but give very small guarantee. Also OLPC is at intersection of generic i386 XT-almost-compatible and OFW. Whether ieee1275 or i386 functions work better can be inferred from testing on real hardware but failing that none is used and corresponding functionality is just disabled. Because of all these reasons i386-ieee1275 lags behind and missing features often require special case-checking in other parts. E.g. write-back to nand is probably trivial to implement but can't be so without testing. Supporting jffs2 on nand without testing isn't realistic either. Because of all these reasons it may be time to either find solutions to at least some of problems (mainly lack of testing) or to retire the port altogether.
P.S: attitude of OFW devs of rejecting even an idea of GRUB for OLPC like I've just experienced on IRC isn't helpful.
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