> p.s.: Is SUNW interested in GRUB2 on sparc? We finally could boot from > USB mass storage then.
The idea that GRUB or GRUB2 has anything to do with what devices a system can or can not boot from is mostly a miss-conception. A number of amd64/legacy-x86 systems have BIOSs that can talk to and boot from USB devices. On such systems GRUB as well as a number of other boot loaders can be loaded from a USB device by the BIOS and then using the BIOS's support talk to and continue booting from this USB device. GRUB2 on sparc sits on top of OBP (ieee1275) and uses it to talk to IO devices. The current Sun OBPs do not have support for USB devices. As such GRUB doesn't change the picture. WRT getting OBP support for USB: At least one other vendor, who seems to be abandoning their OBP strategy, did have USB support in their OBPs, so perhaps someone could ask nicely and talk then into freeing/opening their code for this. Now I used the term mostly. One could implement native support for USB in GRUB (or any other boot-strap) and then as long as this USB enabled boot-strap is loaded from something other than USB that OBP (or whatever firmware) _can_ talk to, then the OS load could be completed (but not initiated) from a USB device. The native NIC drivers work that way in that they are loaded by the generic PXE code and then interface with the NIC directly. So, GRUB2 does _not_ get us any closer to booting our sparc systems from USB devices. Now to put the soap box aside and answer you question: We are continuing to look at GRUB2 as a way to get a cross-platform consistent menuing interface that may be useful for managing multiple boot-environments. This is particularly interesting as the possibility of zfs snapshots of (coming soon) zfs root filesystems will increase the number of boot-environments on a typical system. -jan
