Re: Any progress with grub-installer?

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

On 1/7/19 16:31, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> On 1/7/19 4:22 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> > I have done this now:
> >
> > glaubitz@kyoto:~/grub-debian/test$ find /usr/lib/grub/sparc64-ieee1275/ -name "*.img" -exec file {} \;
> > /usr/lib/grub/sparc64-ieee1275/diskboot.img: data
> > /usr/lib/grub/sparc64-ieee1275/cdboot.img: SPARC executable
> > /usr/lib/grub/sparc64-ieee1275/kernel.img: ELF 64-bit MSB executable, SPARC V9, relaxed memory ordering, version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, stripped
> > /usr/lib/grub/sparc64-ieee1275/boot.img: SPARC executable
> > glaubitz@kyoto:~/grub-debian/test$
> >
> > Try the packages from here:
>
> I tried to install GRUB using a ELF boot image:
>
> root@debian:~/grub2# grub-install /dev/vdiska
> Installing for sparc64-ieee1275 platform.
> grub-install: error: the size of `/boot/grub/sparc64-ieee1275/boot.img' is not 512.
> root@debian:~/grub2# ls -l /boot/grub/sparc64-ieee1275/boot.img
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 816 Jan  7 18:29 /boot/grub/sparc64-ieee1275/boot.img
> root@debian:~/grub2#
>
> So, the generated ELF image is too big. No idea yet how to address this.

That's odd. Installed on my machine (a V240 this time) the "boot.img" 
from the grub-sparc-elf-v2 packages from [1] is actually smaller than 
the original one from the packages in Debian Ports currently:

```
## 2.02+dfsg1-9
root@v240-2:/usr/lib/grub/sparc64-ieee1275# ls -l boot.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 480 Dec  7 10:38 boot.img

## 2.02+dfsg1-4
$ ls -l boot.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 512 Apr  1  2018 boot.img
```

...which is backed by the output of `hexdump -C` for both files:

```
## 2.02+dfsg1-9
# hexdump -C boot.img
00000000  40 00 00 51 a0 10 00 0c  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 
|@..Q............|
00000010  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 
|................|
*
00000080  00 00 00 00 00 00 04 00  00 00 42 00 66 69 6e 64 
|..........B.find|
[...]

## 2.02+dfsg1-4
$ hexdump -C boot.img
00000000  01 03 01 07 00 00 01 e0  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 
|................|
00000010  00 00 00 00 00 00 40 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 
|......@.........|
00000020  40 00 00 51 a0 10 00 0c  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 
|@..Q............|
00000030  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 
|................|
*
000000a0  00 00 00 00 00 00 04 00  00 00 42 00 66 69 6e 64 
|..........B.find|
[...]
```

The newer one is missing 32 bytes at the beginning.

[1]: https://people.debian.org/~glaubitz/grub-sparc-elf-v2/

I still have to test this with an on-disk installation.

Cheers,
Frank