On Thu, 2009-07-02 at 16:48 +0800, Bean wrote: > Hi, > > Here are some of my ideas about the new features of grub. > > Move kernel to a module. > This make it possible to relocate the kernel. For example, we can use > it to move grub-pc to upper memory, and free conventional memory for > use by real mode os such as MS-DOS. grub can resides in memory even > after os take overs, and we can invoke it through interrupt hooks.
I don't care about MS DOS. Other OSes should not need GRUB. If you want GRUB to be a supervisor or a microkernel, it's better that GRUB loads them instead of incorporating their functionality. The only reason for GRUB to _be_ a supervisor or a microkernel would be to implement some kind of TPM, and I don't think we should spend development effort on that unless were can be sure that it won't be used against our users. > LUA integration. > LUA is quite powerful, it's more suitable to do complicated task than > sh script. For example, we can use it to detect os at runtime, > implement simple commands, or draw the graphic menu. Yes, I think LUA improvements should continue. We may switch to a LUA implementation of grub.cfg at some point. > Read/Write file system support > We can implement two kind of fs drivers. The boot time driver is > read-only, but after entering normal mode, we can optionally load > another driver for write support. This approach has been used by EFI. > For example, it has a default FAT driver, but you can also load an > extended FAT driver > later. I think it's pure featuritis. There is no reason for a bootloader to write to filesystems except to store it's state, which is already implemented. What would GRUB write? Implementing and maintaining full featured drivers would take a lot of effort. I'd rather see someone implement UUIDs for all filesystems. > Disk emulation. > Now that it has drivemap command, we can extended it to map hard disk > or cdrom image file, roughly equivalent to the memdisk of syslinux. Hard drives and CD-ROMs are usually large and would take a lot of space in memory that would need to remain allocated. I think we need a strong case to start that effort. I'd rather see an effort to support CD-ROM and other ATAPI devices without disrupting BIOS access to the hard drives and floppies. We also need AHCI support. -- Regards, Pavel Roskin _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
