Re: SILO/GRUB coordination

[Niels Möller]

Gordon Matzigkeit <address@hidden> writes:

> This is where my interest comes in: I believe it is worthwhile to have
> a common code base for bootloaders on multiple platforms.  However,
> the only real way of making that happen is with configure scripts and
> C preprocessor macros.

I'm not sure you really need any advanced macros. For accessing
devices, what you need is probably some kind of pseudo-filesystem
interface, with operations like

  read the "root directory"/devices list,

  read subdirectories (partitions, directories on filesystems),

  read a file into memory.

Or am I oversimplifying things? Device names like sd(1,2,3) doesn't
map directly onto a file system design, but perhaps one could create
some general parametrized-names abstraction, or hack around it some
other way. In particular, is it desirable to do TAB-completion of
sd(1,2,3)-style names?

I don't know about the other aspects of the system that grub needs to
know about.

There can be several implementations of the pseudo-filesystem above,
selected at configure time or at runtime, as appropriate. That kind of
design is quite standard.

What you're doing with fig is cool, but for GRUB I feel it may be
appropriate to apply the "do the simplest thing that could possibly
work"-mantra. I'm guilty of reading the XP book recently...

Regards,
/Niels