[Angstrom-devel] Bootloading: the revolution, was: Re: [RFC] update release images with 2007.12-rX

[Paul Sokolovsky]

Hello,

On Sun, 17 Feb 2008 13:42:17 +0100
Koen Kooi <k.kooi at student.utwente.nl> wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Paul Sokolovsky schreef:
> 
> | 4. Otherwise (no root= or cmdline from bad 1st stage bootloader), it
> | shows interactive menu listing of all available block devices with
> | supported file systems. These include: ext2, jffs2, and for vfat -
> | loopback images in the root directory. Also, NFS option is given.
> |
> | 5. Once user selects location, it checks if /boot/zImage (sic)
> exists, | and if so, kexecs to it with appropriately constructed
> root=. If | no /boot/zImage exists, it just uses that rootfs directly
> | (switch_root's to it).
> 
> It would be really sweet if those scripts parsed /proc/config.gz to
> control which options are presented to the user. No use in showing CF
> boot or trying to load pcmcia modules if the defconfig has those
> disabled. For the bitcounters among us: disabling OABI compat on ARM
> will gives us back the bits 'wasted' by CONFIG_IKCONFIG. All non-arm
> systems I know off have enough space for the kernel to stop us
> worrying.

/proc/config.gz is important lifecycle maintenance feature, it is of
course enabled in linux-hh. But why parse it? Again,
initramfs-bootmenu uses actual partitions available
(per /proc/partitions) as the source of user choices. As for loading
modules, that's done with "modprobe -q foo 2>/dev/null", so no smoke if
they're not there ;-).

> 
> regards,
> 
> Koen
> 
[]


-- 
Best regards,
 Paul                          mailto:pmiscml at gmail.com