On Thu, Apr 11, 2019 at 05:11:29PM +0300, Mike Banon wrote:
Dear Gerd Hoffman,
If my advanced_bootmenu new patch ( [*] link below ) is not upstream-able ( for what reasons? ),
Too many changes in a single patch. Needs splitting up into one patch per change.
what's currently in SeaBIOS master. However, I just tested your patches and noticed some issues which did not exist at my original version [*] - https://mail.coreboot.org/hyperkitty/list/seabios@seabios.org/thread/CKWLNTZ... . I hope that you could review my feedback and address at least some of them :
Well, the patch solves *one* problem.
- It is not possible to choose the boot entry by a single key press
of a fullsize keyboard. We have so many keyboard keys, why are we limited to 1234567890 ? Seems inefficient. The alternative way, which I followed, is to continue with qwertyuiop etc. - to utilize 4 rows of keyboard keys - and make a single key press selection possible.
Fixed in v2 -- back to single key mode, using letter keys for entry #10 and beyond.
- If there are >20 menu entries, the first menu entries may not fit
on a screen. (That's why I had to add 2 pages support.) Perhaps you think it's unlikely that anyone would need >20 menu entries: however,
Even 10 entries not being enough comes up rarely enough. Now you have 24 (visible) entries with standard vga text mode (80x25). If that still isn't enough I guess I'd try to use 80x50 text mode instead of implementing multiple pages.
In any case this should go to a separate patch.
if you are a floppy-based OS developer who is debugging something that could be reproduced only at bare metal (so no QEMU) - you may want to add a lot of different versions of your floppy to your coreboot build
- to reduce the amount of BIOS chip reflashes and just for your
convenience.
Well, the syslinux bootloader comes with a memdisk utility, you can boot from floppy images stored on your hard drive that way. I would prefer this over reflashing the BIOS all day long.
- Although a few USB numpads do have an Escape key (e.g. Motospeed
K23), the majority of them do not - so it is impossible for them to open a boot menu by pressing Escape - simply because no such key. (That's why I added "/" character to the menukeys - every USB numpad has this key.)
Separate patch too.
Also, in your patch version it's not possible to access TPM from a numpad because no t or m keys on it - so I had to add '-' character to the menukeys.
That is pointless unless you fix the tpm menu to support the numpad too. And, of course, make that a separate patch.
cheers, Gerd