• DevelopmentNotes

Development Notes

In this page there is a collection of task that could be done and some reference pointers to material to help to accomplish task. If you are going to work on task please inform us about it in mailing list and add your name on the task in this page.

Support for CD-ROM on i386-pc

There are couple of issues related for using CD-ROM in GRUB 2. First most of the BIOS'es doesn't provide support to read CD-ROM unless booted from one. There might be possibility to use EDD v3.0 compliant BIOS'es to chainload a CD-ROM booting, but this theory has yet to be tested. Last resort is to support ATA controllers and use it's packet commands to communicate direcly with CD-ROM's. This should work with all today's IDE controllers. In order to support CD-ROM chainloading in case BIOS doesn't support it, El-torito emulation layer must be implemented and chained as int 13h handler to system upon chainloading attempt.

Here are some pointers to related specifications:

• BIOS Enhanced Disk Drive Services-3 (EDD-3) (final draft)

• Erratum for BIOS Enhanced Disk Drive Services-3 (EDD-3) (final draft)

• ATA Host Adapter Standards (final draft)

• T13 Techinal Commitee - ATA controller specs

Currently working on this task as part of the Google Summer of Code - AlexRoman

Support for USB devices on i386-pc

Some BIOS'es doesn't handle external USB devices correctly. There has been several time requests to support USB from GRUB. Project would involve writing of USB stack to GRUB and then adding USB mass storage driver. In chainloading is wanted to be supported then enhanced int 13h handler must be provided.

Here are some specifications related to USB:

• Official USB specifications

• Open Host Controller Interface (OHCI) specification (USB 1)

• Universal Host Controller Interface (UHCI) specification (USB 1)

• Enhanced Host Controller Interface (EHCI) specification (USB 2)

Better support for international glyphs

In order to support more "excotic" scripts there is a need to improve glyph rendering. There are two objectives here, one is to add support for better fonts and second is to add support for rendering scripts correctly.

Here are some pointers:

• FreeType, A Free, High-Quality, and Portable Font Engine

• Unicode Standard Annex #9 The Bidirectional Algorithm

• GNU FriBidi library

Add support for other bitmap formats

In order to make bitmaps smaller and to make it easier for users to make bitmaps it might be good idea to add support for other image formats. Formats to though could include PNG and JPEG, and if you are really enthuasist you could work on SVG support.

Here are some pointers to specifications and existing libraries:

• PNG Specifications

• libpng

• Independent JPEG Group

• SVG Specificaiton

• SVG Rendering Library

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