Google SoC, Fancy Menus or USB keyboard

[Colin D Bennett]

I am interested in possibly contributing to the GRUB project in the 
Google Summer of Code, and I was interested in further discussing the 
Fancy Menus idea.

I have not used GRUB 2 yet (I am using Gentoo Linux primarily, with GRUB 
0.9x), though I have downloaded and browsed the source code. I assume 
that fancy menus will still use the keyboard exclusively as the input 
device, for the time being. (Is there talk of mouse support?)

Does GRUB code run in real mode? I was thinking that double-buffering 
the graphics might be important for fancy graphics effects, and wondered 
whether is it difficult to allocate and deal with a megabyte or so block 
of memory? When I last programmed real mode programs in DOS, I know the 
limitations based on segment sizes, etc., but it's been a while.

Thanks!
Best Regards,
Colin