I'm posting this to see if anyone's interested in a simple mod I made to grub 0.92 that allows grub to boot a system w/ no video board taking advantage of grub's serial port capabilities.
I basically disabled output to the screen via INT calls in stage1 and stage1.5. On my system that has no video board, it would hang when stage 1 tried to use an INT call to write to a non-existent VGA BIOS. With the mods in place, nothing is written to the VGA screen and the first sign of life from GRUB is the "press any key" messages on the serial port. Then you get the GRUB menu and can boot for instance the linux kernel with serial console enabled. If a video board is installed, you simply see nothing on it with this mod to GRUB. Three files were modified to disable MSG(x) macros and a printf. The only disadvantage to this is you don't get to see any possible early stage1 or stage1.5 error messages. The idea is to get everything working w/ video enabled and when you're ready to run w/o video, re-build grub w/ my changes. I was thinking a configure option could be added like "--no-vga" or something to build GRUB with no output to VGA for folks like me that want to run w/ no video board. Let me know and I will make a formalized patch against 0.92 with the new configure option. I wanted to see if anyone wanted this before I make a patch. GRUB turned out to be an excellent solution to boot linux on our "video-less" boards for testing. -- Eric Malkowski Principal Software Engineer ADC - The Broadband Company _______________________________________________ Bug-grub mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-grub