Re: GRUB2 Build on Mac OS X

[Marco Gerards]

Andrei Warkentin <address@hidden> writes:

Hi Andrei,

> There is another issue with GRUB2 on OS X which I am not sure has
> been brought up yet.
> Right now, AFAIK (but I haven't tested it), GRUB2 (the part that runs
> from OpenFrimware) can be built
> with a bootstrap powerpc-elf-targetted GCC hosted on OS X. However,
> the local GRUB2 binary (one that can run
> from OS X and perform installation and some such) needs to be
> compiled with the OS X compiler. Why? OS X doesn't use ELF -
> it uses Mach-O. If you want to be able to build GRUB2 in OS X with
> purely the OS X GCC, then the build procedure must take into account
> the Mach-O
> output format. AFAIK, new OpenFirmware versions (3.x) can boot Mach-O
> binaries but I haven't had a chance to experiment with this yet.

You mean the utilities like grub-setup, grub-mkimage, grub-emu, etc?
They should be able to run on macos, right?  Of perhaps I am missing
your point.

If those utilities can be build in a better way so nothing breaks and
it will work on macos, I am quite interested in hearing how to solve
that.

Mach-O binaries for booting is a different subject.  We rely on ELF
files, grub-mkimage even creates ELF files and uses ELF load
segments.  Without it GRUB just won't work, unless grub-mkimage is
changed intensively.  So it seems easier just to use ELFs in any case.

--
Marco