Re: SILO/GRUB coordination

[Niels Möller]

Gordon Matzigkeit <address@hidden> writes:

> I feel like the situation got better when the build environment
> changed so that you could run the GRUB shell under your favorite OS.
> It helped make many kinds of bugs easier to track down.

What this means is that you already have two "backends", one low-level
PC BIOS thing, and one that runs on top of a unix-like environment.
sparc/openboot support would "only" be yet another one.

> I'm operating under two main pressures (which may or may not be real):
> I believe GRUB should provide a programmable environment to allow people
> to do useful things with their machine even before booting;

I see. From that point of view, using fig makes more sense. Would
using fig be enough to be able to do useful things, or would one need
fig *and* some programming language?

I wonder how it would interact with openboot? SILO (at least the old
version I'm using) is like a program started from the boot prompt, it
takes full control, and can either boot something else or return back
to the boot prompt. Ideally, one would want to be able to mix GRUB and
FORTH in some way, but I have no idea if that is possible.

As for programmability, I suspect that one thing that will limit the
usability of any boot time programming environment is how convenient
it is to save (as well as load and edit) programs. I've never done
anything complex in openboot (and I don't really know FORTH), but I
find it very useful for looking around in the machine, see what disks
are available, etc.

/Niels