FILO 0.3

[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.
-- 
Takeshi