Marco’s blog

Last year I have implemented a Dirac (BBC) decoder for FFmpeg, as a Google Summer of Code project. This year I will be working on a Summer of Code project again, now for GNU GRUB. The goal is to implement a USB framework including some drivers for GRUB 2. When this is implemented, you can access USB HID and USB Mass Storage devices from GRUB, even when the firmware does not support this. You might want to use this when your BIOS does not support USB. More importantly, this increases the usability of GRUB 2 on top of Coreboot (formerly known as LinuxBIOS). Because of this (and other GRUB 2 features we are working on), Coreboot + GRUB 2 might serve as a good (and Free!) BIOS replacement.

The first thing I will do is reading some books about USB, namely “USB Complete” and “Universal Serial Bus System Architecture”. Although I have some doubts about the quality of the second book, it’s better than reading the USB specification from the screen (which I eventually will have to do). I have ordered both books and I am looking forwards to getting started.

Because I will read these books first and because I am busy with my studies, I will not start producing code from the start, you can expect the first code somewhere in June. The first thing I plan to look at is libusb, which makes it possible to play with USB without having a complete UHCI driver. It should be easy to integrate this into grub-emu, more on this later.

As for Dirac, it still isn’t finished (unfortunately!). When I have time to look at this, I will. But if someone is interested in working on this, please tell me. The remaining tasks are not hard.