Re: How does install-grub work?

[Danny Milosavljevic]

On Mon, 29 Aug 2016 22:29:40 +0200
David Craven <address@hidden> wrote:

>So for booting a vm we don't actually need a boot loader, since it passes the 
>kernel image through the -kernel flag. 

Huh, that appears to be the case. Back when I used VMs the first time they 
simulated the entire PC, BIOS and all and there you would need the partition 
table, bootloader etc just as you would on a real PC. But it seems to have 
changed now...

> @Danny: Did you write install-uboot.c? I don't have a clue what it's
> doing =P

Yes, I wrote it. It makes sure it's safe to write to an unclaimed 
fixed-position section of a drive and then writes to it.

Essentially it does

$ dd if=u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin of=/dev/sdX bs=1024 seek=8 
        ^^^                                                ^^^
        depends on board                                   depends on board

but only after making sure that this doesn't clobber anything (payload data on 
parititons, the partition table etcetc).

It's supposed to be analogous to grub-install, just for u-boot.