Hello Nico,
Saturday, November 26, 2016, 6:42:40 PM, you wrote:
NH> Hey coreboot folks, NH> here's something that's bugging me for a long time: Our lack of an out- NH> of-the-box booting experience.
NH> All our payloads that don't implement legacy boot facilities (i.e. BIOS, NH> UEFI), only work in the usual case, to boot an installed OS that's con- NH> figured to work with that payload. But they stink at booting in the un- NH> usual case, e.g. from installation, rescue or live boot media.
NH> One could now point a finger at the developers of those media and say, NH> they only have an MBR / UEFI boot partition, no GRUB / FILO / whatever NH> configuration file. So it's their fault? Well, I say, it's our fault! NH> We never specified how a civilized, general booting process shall look NH> like.
NH> My proposal: Let's specify a fallback boot mechanism for bootloaders for NH> the case they feel lost. This would include
NH> o a configuration file format (to specify a binary to load along NH> with its parameters),
NH> o a search scheme for the configuration file (e.g. search the first NH> partition of each disk for `/boot/rettungsboot`),
NH> o a set of supported partition table formats,
NH> o a set of supported file systems,
NH> o a set of binary formats that one can expect the payload to support NH> (e.g. multiboot2, multiboot, bzImage).
NH> The configuration file format should be most lean and simple. We might NH> want support for multiple options (i.e. a simple menu) though. Some- NH> thing like the legacy GRUB format maybe? NH> What do you think?
https://xkcd.com/927/ comes to mind immediately.
What would be the incentive for the boot media creators to support yet another booting format, supported by a tiny amount of systems? Why not instead consider including a minimal subset of SeaBIOS or Tianocore (enough for booting), or maybe do a survey and try to support the most common variations of grub/isolinux etc used on such CDs?