In short: is it possible to get grub to directly boot an amd64 kernel
without going through the chainloader?



Here's why I need to do that.

I'm trying to test a kernel to which I've added LSI SAS support to the
mpt driver.  This is on hardware to which I have remote console and
power, but no direct access.  The hardware has 8GB RAM, and therefore
cannot boot an i386 kernel.  It already has the grub that comes with
Solaris installed.  (Its a Sun x4200.)

I don't have access to the DHCP server, nor to the server where the grub
menu.lst file is loaded.  I do however have root access to other
machines on the same subnet, so I can set up an alternate TFTP or NFS
server (not DHCP!)

As far as I know, there are no physical removable storage, and in fact
the only mass storage on the system is the mpt-connected SAS drives
(which I need my newly modified driver to access!)

I do have access to the local ufs filesystem, which has Solaris
installed on it.

What I'd love to be able to do is something like:

grub> root (hd0,0,a)
grub> kernel /netbsd
(or kernel --type=netbsd /netbsd)

grub> boot

The problem is that the kernel command doesn't seem to like amd64 files.

Is there something I can do to work around this, without having to ask
someone to change hardware around for me?

Thanks!

    -- Garrett

PS: Yes, if it works, I'll contribute the mpt patches for these SAS
controllers... and I'm also going to backport to 3.0 and 3.1.