Even if actually both loader installboot and grub installgrub are both based on sparc installboot, there platform differences are quite large - starting from partition handling (MBR+VTOC/MBR logical partitions+VTOC/GPT) ending with stage1 management, bootblock on sparc is split, handle the bootblock locations in case of zfs/ufs/pcfs on different partitioning schemes, I just felt a lot safer to have separate copy. I guess it is possible to merge the installboot.[ch] into one file, but the result will be preprocessor #if #else #endif spaghetti and im not sure if the result will be worth it. Also consider if we have single source and need to update, the result has to be tested on both platforms or we have really unhappy sparc people... I think, it is better to keep separation here.

I'm not talking about one installboot.[ch], but there are surely a lot of duplicate code, which could live in common/something.[ch].

Ah i see. Well, I did trivial check with vim -d, and it was not too promising really. Actually even thinking about it - current sparc installboot is only supporting VTOC, just splitting bootblk at 7.5k and writing it down to two location - there really is not too much to share.

oh, great stuff, many thanks! I updated this review request accordingly. However, something got confused, browsing diff 1 to 2 is broken, at least full diff from 0 to 2 seems to be correct. Just in case I did set up webrev as well at http://cr.illumos.org/~webrev/tsoome/6701/ Guess I need to poke LeftWing a bit.

The code in usr/src/cmd/boot/common will get warnings without it. Would need separate issue, I guess.

going to be fixed in 7242

The sparc and x86 have different meanings for -F, inherited from installgrub as I wrote installboot based on installgrub source. This is not ideal choise, but...