[coreboot] GRUB2 is too big as a payload in ThinkPad X201

Alexandru Gagniuc mrnuke at google.com
Mon Mar 30 13:04:47 CEST 2015


On Friday, March 27, 2015 11:49:54 AM Berth-Olof Bergman wrote:
> Personally I don’t understand why boot loaders insist on writing the code
> the way they do. There is BIOS services for boot device I/O, serial port
> debug and putting payloads anywhere in memory. I think a boot loader will
> suffice running in 16-bit real mode or unreal mode (16-bit code, 32-bit
> data) and using the BIOS APIs to communicate with the hardware. It will
> always be compatible and a lot faster. I think most boot loaders are overly
> bloated.

And you'd rather bloat the hardware init code instead? The code for those 
services has to reside _somewhere_.

Guess what! SeaBIOS does all that, and it's paper thin. I wish the GRUB guys 
would figure out the bloat. They probably already did, but didn't document it.

Alex



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