Thread: Proposal/idea for a "new" bootmenu
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fanoush is offline fanoush
2008-08-11 , 07:13
Posts: 2,152 | Thanked: 1,490 times | Joined on Jan 2006 @ Czech Republic
#4
Yes, bootmenu/initfs_flasher is currently not very usable for running from automatic installer scripts. To make bootmenu more friendly for installers it would be nice to

1. allow silent installation i.e. default install with no questions or take answers from parameters or file. I guess penguinbait did some work on this already (?)
2. provide commands to add/remove boot items
3. package it into .deb

Originally Posted by Stskeeps View Post
Proposal:
Bootmenu that loads bootmenu.conf from a boot partition (this may be the internal flash (as in mtdblock4), or in Diablo, initfs itself. If bootmenu.conf loading fails, it may be able to select USB network recovery and such or use a default setting

The idea is to mount the boot partition read only, read the file, and unmount it (if not on initfs)
Scanning random partitions at boot time can be slow. Mounting jffs2 in particular is not exactly fast. You also need to insert extra modules in case of ext2/3. Also what to do if more bootmenu.conf files are found?

It does not look very deterministic and robust to me. I'd like to keep bootmenu independent on any root filesystem. Is location of bootmenu.conf really a problem if other issues mentioned here are solved? If yes than I would prefer putting it to end of kernel partition possibly gzipped to save space and to have some sort of container. In fact config partition /dev/mtd1 is designed for this but I currently don't know how to write some configuration item there.
Originally Posted by Stskeeps View Post

Bootmenu that has interface like:

# bootmenu add <uuid> <title> <image?> <partition> <file system type> <fs options> <extra boot options>
Adds a boot menu item with those settings, with a UUID so we can easily remove it later.
Good idea in general. I'd prefer to pass to such bootmenu command some file with menu item template similar to current bootmenu.conf syntax. It would just merge the item into existing one and reflash initfs if it is not directly writable.

Originally Posted by Stskeeps View Post
The image would maybe have ability to do something like http://www.slashgear.com/gallery/dat...mp-photo10.png .
Wow, images :-) That's a lot of work.

I'm happy to accept patches. There is also bootmenu garage project so if more people start to produce some code we can work there.
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