Re: [Qemu-devel] suggestion for the QEMU advent calendar

[Stefan Hajnoczi]

On Tue, Dec 9, 2014 at 9:44 AM, Fabian Greffrath <address@hidden> wrote:
> Am Dienstag, den 09.12.2014, 10:28 +0100 schrieb Kevin Wolf:
>> Syslinux is relatively easy as well. Just avoid GRUB 2 if you want to
>> set up disk images from the host. I've done it before, but it's ugly...
>
> Yep, I was talking about GRUB 2. However, in the meantime I have figured
> out what to do in order to create a "minimal" booting image. After all
> the image creation, partitioning, formatting, device mapping and finally
> mounting you only have to call "grub-install" with the right parameters
> (!), copy the actual kernel into the image and create a minimal grub.cfg
> file.
>
> By "right parameters" I meant that grub-install per default copies GRUB
> 2 in its entirety onto the image, including the whole menu system,
> graphical support, file system drivers and localization, etc. This will
> take up about 10MB, which is why I put the "minimal" word in quotation
> marks. You can, of course, manually select which modules you want to
> install, but this must be a perfect guess. In my simple case it worked
> with '--install-modules="part_msdos ext2 multiboot normal" --locales=""'
> passed to grub-install on the command line.
>
> Anyway, it's easier to just boot the multiboot kernel image and be done
> with it. ;)

The multiboot image is fine.

10 MB for a boot loader?  Just wow, at some point it's better to slap
a boot sector onto the Linux kernel and be done with it, kexec already
exists.

Stefan