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中国DOS联盟论坛 » GRUB4DOS、SYSLINUX及其它启动管理软件讨论专区 » GNU GRUB - Google 2008 Code Summer Days View 1,597 Replies 2
Original Poster Posted 2008-05-24 09:44 ·  中国 北京 西城区 联通
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Welcome to reprint, please refrain from reprinting without indicating the source
based on: http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/grub-soc.html

GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader), a powerful and standard bootloader, has been rewritten for better portability and usability. The next major version of Grub will be Grub2.

All our ideas below are to make Grub2 replace what we call the traditional version of Grub, Grub 0.9x:



USB Support

We often find that GRUB cannot access USB devices under BIOS restrictions, such as storage disks, keyboards. However, to bypass BIOS restrictions to support this function, we need to do a lot of work, so we plan to implement UHCI support - because QEMU can virtualize such devices.



ATA Parallel and Serial Devices

Often we also find that GRUB has many bugs when using the disk functions provided by BIOS. Usually this can be avoided, but sometimes it cannot. Although GRUB has a serial ATA driver, it is still a long way from completion and currently only supports the traditional mode.



Unit Testing Framework

It would be great if we could implement a unit testing framework to automatically detect the functions of units and report the results to developers. Some functions we can use grub-fstest/grub-emu, others can use Qemu/Boches/Vmware, etc.



Access to Encrypted Partitions

Now the function of encrypted partitions is supported in various mainstream GNU/Linux distribution kits. If we can access these encrypted partitions from the GRUB command line, GRUB users will benefit, such as loading the kernel from these encrypted partitions to boot the system.

We plan to start with LUKS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Unified_Key_Setup), a widely used standard.



Localization Support

GRUB can already display UTF-8 characters very well, which is the performance of the gfxterm function. Based on this, we can add language support for many countries without doing too much work. However, we also need to support this module through gettext, and make some additional enhancements in GRUB to better support this localization function.



Stunning Menu Interface

We are looking for a stunning menu interface component that can support animations, color effects, style sheets, etc. This function should be based on GRUB's video API and should share as much code as possible with the character interface (Note: that is, the code of the graphics and character interfaces can be as general as possible, rather than very different).



Built-in Partition Support

Integrate with GNU's partition tool library (libparted) so that GRUB can use this powerful partition function when booting. This component should support partition creation, deletion, partition size change, and file system related functions. These functions are particularly useful when we encounter a very complex boot environment.



Porting to New Platforms

GRUB has been ported to some new platforms, including PC/BIOS, OPenFireware (including PowerPC and x86), EFI (x86), and coreboot/LinuxBios (x86). Porting to Sparc64 is in progress.

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Translated and organized by Yu Wutao on 2008-05-24
Floor 2 Posted 2008-05-24 23:06 ·  中国 天津 联通
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Evolution...Perfection...Anticipated
Floor 3 Posted 2008-05-26 00:44 ·  中国 福建 厦门 电信
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http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/Google_Summer_of_Code_Ideas

Rewriting Gfxboot as a COM32 module
Some distributions (such as SuSE and Ubuntu) use a patched version of SYSLINUX that includes an interpreted graphics engine named gfxboot. However, the patch is in assembly and of very poor code quality, so it has not been merged. This project aims to cleanly reimplement it in C, using existing graphics libraries already part of the "COM32" libraries in SYSLINUX.

There is a specification for the Gfxboot byte code.
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