Re: Time to fork the netboot code?

[Thierry Laronde]

On Thu, May 10, 2001 at 10:07:03AM +0200, Christoph Plattner wrote:
> I have a similar oppinion !
>[..] 
> 
> PS: Many boot monitors are working polling, and GRUB should become
> (or is already) the "best" boot monitor, but no Operating System !!

What is an OS is a matter of opinion. GRUB is already a mini-OS. And the
fact is that a good bootloader must be able to help you bootstrap an OS,
that is progressively increase the level of complexity the more efficient
way. For example, when GRUB detects a NIC card to try to boot from the
network, if this information can be sent in order for the system to load an
operating system with the good drivers (modules/servers) it would be great,
etc...

As explained by Okuji, until we have real memory management and --- for i386
--- v86, everything will be (more) difficult. If you are able to launch and
control a "program", you can try several drivers returning to the OS if a
timeout is reached, etc...

Cheers,
-- 
Thierry LARONDE, Centre de Ressources Informatiques, Archamps - France
http://www.cri74.org
PingOO, serveur de com sur distribution GNU/Linux: http://www.pingoo.org