Re: lilo vs other OS bootloaders was: FreeBSD makes progress

[H. Peter Anvin]

Followup to:  <[e-mail]>
By author:    [e-mail] (Eric W. Biederman)
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> Alan Cox <[e-mail]> writes:
> 
> > > So of course I realize this wouldn't happen any time soon, but has any
> > > discussion taken place regarding enhancing the bootloader (grub? Steal
> > > FreeBSD's?) to load modular drivers very early, and possibly abstracting
> > > SMP/UP from the kernel proper? Wouldn't this be a better solution than
> > > initrd?
> > 
> > All the discussion we have has been based on seriously enhancing and
> > expanding the use of the initrd/ramfs layer. Remember we can begin running
> > from ramfs without interrupts, pci bus scans or the like. The things it cant
> > do are - pick a kernel by processor type, pick SMP/non SMP.
> > 
> > As it happens both of those are things that are deeply buried in the whole
> > compile choices and how we generate the code itself - so they do need to
> > be boot loader driven (or user driven)
> > 
> > So the path for ACPI could indeed go
> > 
> > load kernel
> > load initial ramfs
> > Discover we have ACPI
> > load acpi core
> > load acpi irq router
> > load acpi timers
> > [init hardware]
> > load ide disk
> > load ext3
> > mount /
> 
> Sounds about right.  
> 
> If we really need to do weird things like pick a kernel by processor
> type, or pick SMP/non SMP.  You can even do those from an initramfs
> with a linux  booting linux kernel patch.
> 

I discussed something like this before using "Genesis"; the idea
behind it was to make sure we have enough modules to access the
filesystem before the kernel starts (by using pre-initialization code
that can read filesystem using the firmware interface.)  Unfortunately
life got busy on me, but I still think that it is probably the right
way to approach this.

	-hpa

-- 
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