Hello!
> I've fixed a serious bug in Stage 1.5, and GRUB now can boot with
> Stage 1.5 at least in my environment. Please test the latest version
> if you have time and energy. ;-)
As soon as I get home :-)
> But one big problem appears. The size of ffs_stage1_5 is almost the
> same as the maximum possible size. I think now is the time when we
> should reconsider how to keep Stage 1.5 enough small. Thus, I will
> change the path syntax internally. What I think of is:
CFLAGS could be "-Os" unless overridden by user.
> This implementation will make the source code much simpler and Stage
> 1.5 will not have to recognize many complex formats. As the result, it
> will become much smaller.
I can imagine stage1.5 which knows nothing about any filesystem, but
loads a list of blocks, e.g (hd0)+0x1234
I can also imagine stage1.5 which doesn't understand (hd0)+0x1234 syntax.
By the way, nobody is forced to put stage1.5 to the bootblock.
On another hand, if stage1.5 (or stage2) is garanteed to reside in
sequential sectors on the disk, then stage1 could be simplified.
> However, since relatively many changes are required for this work, I'm
> planning to do this work after releasing the next test release. I will
> also commit my changes in Stage 1 at the same time, hopefully with LBA
> support.
This would be great.
Please don't forget to put sample colors to menu.lst. Color names will
make stage2 too bloated, and people would not change them often anyway (if
the default is nice :-) )
Pavel Roskin
