Quoting Capt Beany captbeany@yahoo.co.uk:
Following a failed kernel upgrade of a remote linux box im looking for a replacement to my current boot loader (GRUB) that will fall back to a previous kernel if the new one is corrupt and was wondering if filo could fit the bill (either as is or with some changes) ?
The system in question has software raided disk for redunancy but this doesnt help when the boot kernel is corrupt.
What I hope to achieve is that once the boot loader is running, it will scan the systems boot devices for files containing boot information (the files would either be text files with a known extension or binary files with a magic number) that contain the kernel/ramdisk filenames, the kernel/ramdisk checksums, a boot priority and the checksum of the file itself.
It should then be possible to select the highest priority kernel/ramdisk to boot, checksum it and if this checksum fails fall back to the next kernel/ramdisk pair.
Does this sound like a reasonable approach to the problem ?
Have you checked out the nuni bootloader?
http://freshmeat.net/projects/nuni/
It is a bios independent bootloader that has fallback boot methods. I am not sure what this has to do with LinuxBIOS??
But hey it is open source, and again bios independent, possible payload??
Thanks - Joe