Re: Any progress with grub-installer?

[Frank Scheiner <frank.scheiner@web.de>]

On 1/6/19 21:40, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> Switching list for GRUB on SPARC.
>
> On 1/6/19 9:35 PM, Frank Scheiner wrote:
> > > I think I will work on GRUB on SPARC next to address the build issues there.
> >
> > Before re-enabling COFF for GRUB, we could look into GRUB as ELF on sparc64, because looking at OpenBSD, their second stage bootloader is actually an ELF binary:
> >
> > ```
> > root@nfs:/srv/nfs/openbsd/6.3/sparc64# file ofwboot.net
> > ofwboot.net: ELF 64-bit MSB executable, SPARC V9, relaxed memory ordering, version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, stripped
> >
> > root@nfs:/srv/nfs/openbsd/6.3/sparc64# file bsd.mp
> > bsd.mp: ELF 64-bit MSB executable, SPARC V9, total store ordering, version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, not stripped
> > ```
> >
> > ...so the sparc64 firmware seems to also support ELF binaries. And according to [6] this seems to work for a lot of systems. If an ELF version of GRUB can be provided by someone, I have a lot of sparc64 gear to test on - though not as many as OpenBSD supports ;-).
>
> I do actually. I have built a version of GRUB for sparc64 with the COFF
> linker options stripped off. Feel free to try the packages from [1].
>
> If we actually don't ned COFF even on older SPARC boxes, that would be
> great.
>
> Adrian
>
> > [1] https://people.debian.org/~glaubitz/grub-sparc-elf/

Cool, thanks, will give that a try on my current local machines for a 
start and report back.

Cheers,
Frank