So, spent some time playing with RuL4 on GNU GRUB; read the documentation and had a shufti at the build logs.

First impressions make me think that GRUB’s build system is overcomplex, but that is likely a side effect of the Autotools-isation of the whole system, trying to build a bootloader on a build system approximately as stable as a house of cards during a hurricane.

For bonus points, I tried to cross-build GRUB for i386-elf on elspeth (I’ve been building everything on the P4 up to now) and ran into a major obstacle: the build requires a ‘working C compiler’ and without crt-stuff, i386-elf-gcc on elspeth just won’t work.

I’m also wondering what the dynamic relocation will be like for RuL4; it is, after all, an ELF file, with some form of executable relocation via the rtld (which comes across from L4Re, if I recall correctly).

Perhaps the next step is to build the userland. I’m running two series’ behind, anyway; today, I was expecting to be fully self-hosting.