FILO 0.3

[SONE Takeshi]

I released FILO version 0.3, featuring bzImage loader.
Steve Gehlbach has helped me a lot.

Version 0.3 ts1 2003-10-07
    * Added loader for Linux bzImage/zImage/Image (a.k.a. /vmlinuz).
      Many thanks to Steve Gehlbach  for early
      work on this.
    * New "context switch" routine to unify the assembly starters
      for ELF and Linux, and even the C startup.
      This reduced the amount of assembly code.
    * Debug prints are now automatically prefixed with function names.
    * Lots of internal tweaks.

It can be downloaded from http://te.to/~ts1/filo/.

[Nathanael Noblet]

On Tuesday, October 7, 2003, at 01:29  PM, SONE Takeshi wrote:
> I released FILO version 0.3, featuring bzImage loader.
> Steve Gehlbach has helped me a lot.

That's great.

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...?

[Stefan Reinauer]

* Nathanael Noblet  [031007 21:48]:
> 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...?

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.
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.

Stefan

[Stefan Reinauer]

* SONE Takeshi  [031007 21:29]:
> Version 0.3 ts1 2003-10-07
>
> It can be downloaded from http://te.to/~ts1/filo/.

Takeshi,

Thanks for your cool bootloader. It's something that LinuxBIOS can
really use.

But one thing I noticed, I always get the following error when CCing you
in mails:

: Name service error for tsn.or.jp: Host found but no
data record of requested type

Any idea what causes this?

Stefan

[SONE Takeshi]

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.