Hi Sebastian,
Thanks for looking through my findings.
Am Freitag, den 17.03.2017, 11:01 +0100 schrieb Sebastian Sumpf:
Loading Genode with GRUB2 is sufficient. The main goal is, as you said, to not rely on outdated BIOS features. There is already a work in progress on the NOVA hypervisor (https://github.com/genodelabs/genode/issues/2242), which now supports legacy boot (mutliboot) and UEFI boot (multiboot2).
Yes, I had taken a look at that. I've investigated a bit, but apart from VBE and getting rid of the BDA for communicating the serial port address there doesn't seem to be that much left driver-wise to do at first glance since Genode didn't use many of the AT BIOS features in the first place. RTC driver using EFI runtime services could be added, though.
Sounds very good. VBE is not necessary as Genode already offers a VESA driver.
Yep, that was just to illustrate that it's not specifically an UEFI issue.
I have to admit that this challenge is meant for students with little systems programming knowledge an, so feel free to look into more challenging topics here (http://genode.org/about/challenges). Also, these are just suggestions and you are welcome to propose topics. We also have topics not on the challenges list, if you let us know your interests (like kernel hacking, device drivers, porting ...), we may be able to suggest something more fitting for you.
I'd like to try my hand at device drivers, which was why I looked into the UEFI thing in the first place. Do you have any suggestions there that are not on the list? Isochronous USB is an option, but it looks like it is more about hooking up/passing through the Linux driver code correctly than the actual USB driver stuff.
Regards, Philipp