Re: GRUB plans...

[Christoph Plattner]

Very important for GRUB in concern of multiplatform and especially
cross build of boot images is the BIG/LITTLE ENDIAN problem.
I think, there are some code in the GRUB especially accessing and
installing GRUB wich are not endian safe.

Bye
        Christoph P.


address@hidden wrote:
> 
> Thierry Laronde <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > May I suggest to reorganise, before modifying the code, the tree and
> > names of sources? When I worked on adding the CD and extended floppy
> > formats I was a bit puzzled by the names (stage1 loads start.S which
> > passes control to asm.S which calls common.c which transfers to main in
> > stage2.c ...) and by the organization (architecture dependent code has
> > to be put in a separate directory ; the GRUB versions of some of the
> > functions commonly found in libc should be put in a separate directory
> > too, etc...).
> 
> Some of that organization was purposeful.
> 
> Nearly every OS/low-level-hardware executing program uses "start" as
> the name of the part which does startup, in part because it's VERY
> different from the rest of the code.  GRUB's has stack setup, interrupt
> management, and even some critical 16- & 32-bit code switch control.
> 
> "asm" is the source file for all the extra random bits of assembly.
> 
> "common" is the source file that does common C-level startup for all the
> GRUB stage 1.5+/2 variants before calling what is essentially the "main"
> for whichever variant is built.
> 
> "stage2" is the main stage2 source file.
> 
> I at one point thought I might have had others.  Who knows?  That still
> might be the case.
> 
> As to a reorg, I was going to be discussing some of this with Okuji
> in any case.
> 
> Do you have a suggestion, given the purposes mentioned above?
> 
> > Another thing that would be great is to code with cweb [is there a web
> > implementation for assembly?]. I --- badly --- mimic a web style for
> > stage1.S putting lots of comments, but the interaction between the
> > different pieces of code would be greatly emphasized by literate
> > programming --- probably one of the best ideas of Don Knuth.
> 
> WEB (C and Pascal are the ones I am familiar with) is an interesting
> idea, but I think one fundamentally flawed for the following reasons:
> 
>   --  Most people are not familiar with it.
> 
>   --  It obscures the actual code written somewhat.
> 
>   --  It doesn't exist on many platforms.
> 
> All are barriers to getting real work done.  Hence I'm not in favor of it.
> 
> I'm very much in favor of practical measures to make or encourage
> progress and maintainability.  The general rule I've arrived at which
> seems a bit of a sweet spot maximizing the product of progress,
> understandability, and maintainability (and I won't claim to have
> been consistent with my early work on GRUB 0.5, though some parts
> I did a good job on ;-) is:
> 
>   --  Simple concise code as much as possible.
> 
>   --  Comments/overviews about the high-level architecture and purpose
>       of code, and on parts where the purpose is not clear from what is
>       written (for example, commonly in a bootloader or other hardware-
>       control code, sometimes there are gyrations whose purpose is not
>       clear from looking at the code...  say working around a hardware
>       bug where you can't do certain things even though the interface
>       would seem like you could).
> 
>   --  NO comments on code that can be understood by reading it.  They
>       can (and usually do) get out of date, become more of a confusion
>       than a help, and frankly, if someone can't read straight-forward
>       sections of code without comments, then they shouldn't be trying
>       to mess with it.
> 
> If you want to keep discussing this, we should probably have it offline
> for now.  I realize it can be a religious issue and can't claim I don't
> have some blinders on about it, but subjecting the list to all the
> wrangling will likely be tiresome for many...
> 
> --
>     Erich Stefan Boleyn     <address@hidden>     http://www.uruk.org/
> "Reality is truly stranger than fiction; Probably why fiction is so popular"
> 
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