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Re: Some ideas about new features of grub
From: |
Pavel Roskin |
Subject: |
Re: Some ideas about new features of grub |
Date: |
Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:51:14 -0400 |
On Thu, 2009-07-02 at 16:48 +0800, Bean wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Here are some of my ideas about the new features of grub.
>
> Move kernel to a module.
> This make it possible to relocate the kernel. For example, we can use
> it to move grub-pc to upper memory, and free conventional memory for
> use by real mode os such as MS-DOS. grub can resides in memory even
> after os take overs, and we can invoke it through interrupt hooks.
I don't care about MS DOS. Other OSes should not need GRUB. If you
want GRUB to be a supervisor or a microkernel, it's better that GRUB
loads them instead of incorporating their functionality.
The only reason for GRUB to _be_ a supervisor or a microkernel would be
to implement some kind of TPM, and I don't think we should spend
development effort on that unless were can be sure that it won't be used
against our users.
> LUA integration.
> LUA is quite powerful, it's more suitable to do complicated task than
> sh script. For example, we can use it to detect os at runtime,
> implement simple commands, or draw the graphic menu.
Yes, I think LUA improvements should continue. We may switch to a LUA
implementation of grub.cfg at some point.
> Read/Write file system support
> We can implement two kind of fs drivers. The boot time driver is
> read-only, but after entering normal mode, we can optionally load
> another driver for write support. This approach has been used by EFI.
> For example, it has a default FAT driver, but you can also load an
> extended FAT driver
> later.
I think it's pure featuritis. There is no reason for a bootloader to
write to filesystems except to store it's state, which is already
implemented. What would GRUB write? Implementing and maintaining full
featured drivers would take a lot of effort. I'd rather see someone
implement UUIDs for all filesystems.
> Disk emulation.
> Now that it has drivemap command, we can extended it to map hard disk
> or cdrom image file, roughly equivalent to the memdisk of syslinux.
Hard drives and CD-ROMs are usually large and would take a lot of space
in memory that would need to remain allocated. I think we need a strong
case to start that effort.
I'd rather see an effort to support CD-ROM and other ATAPI devices
without disrupting BIOS access to the hard drives and floppies. We also
need AHCI support.
--
Regards,
Pavel Roskin
Re: Some ideas about new features of grub, Robert Millan, 2009/07/04