On Tue, Oct 07, 2003 at 01:48:00PM -0600, Nathanael Noblet wrote:
I was wondering (in fact started modifying 0.2) to have a config file like grub does, so that it by default checks for that file and loads the default kernel there...? I haven't gotten that far along, but is this something worth pursuing? I just figured it would be nice to have a boot prompt etc so that the kernel to boot doesn't have to be hardcoded into the flash, which means I can play around with different kernels and not worry about it, as well as not having to type in the kernel path and all that everytime...?
I had the same idea, but I didn't have a strong reason to do it. Now that I know people want it, I will do it. Runtime configuration is nice anyway.
On Tue, Oct 07, 2003 at 10:39:34PM +0200, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
Having a config file for filo sounds like a really great idea. A parser for something similar to grub's menu.lst should be rather small to implement, i.e. scan for "title", then get all "kernel", "initrd" and possibly "module" entries for that title, and repeat the same for all "title"s. Additionally "timeout" and "default" would be interesting to control autoboot.
Yes, simple parser would be enough. It is also easy to have a menu interface. But I won't do a full-screen menu interface with background graphics like GRUB does. It will be a simple "tty mode" interface.
With such a system installed on an awkward/phoenix/ami machine could just be plugged into a LinuxBIOS box and work out of the box.
What I'm thinking now is possibility of booting distro CDs. Mounting El-Torito boot image would be easy. Then parsing syslinux.cfg/isolinux.cfg could give us the path to kernel and initrd and command line paramters. Of course, distributors have freedom to put "/filo.conf" on their CDs. :) Anyway, I need a CD-ROM driver before that.