Re: [Xen-devel] [RFC] Bootloader configuration

[Jeremy Katz <katzj@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2006-03-01 at 17:10 -0600, Hollis Blanchard wrote:
> On Tuesday 28 February 2006 14:40, John Levon wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 28, 2006 at 08:31:55PM +0000, Tim Deegan wrote:
> > > A grub port (or similar) seems like the most useful thing.
> > 
> > Right. AFAIK nobody is working on this right now.
> 
> GRUB already implements its own read-only filesystem drivers for a variety of 
> filesystems. It sounds like your "readfs" would be duplicating this work.

Well, GRUB is also duplicating plenty of work.  Filesystem code is fun!
Well, or not ;-)

> > >  The less dom0 has to understand about domU's kernel/fs peculiarities,
> > >  and the less fs, config and loader code that needs to be rewritten
> > >  just for Xen, the better.
> 
> I suppose it would also be nice not to need dom0 access to modify a domU's 
> kernel.

That's the whole point behind the boot loader interface and pygrub as it
currently exists.

> GRUB2 is conveniently very modular. You implement a block driver (Open 
> Firmware and BIOS drivers are already implemented), and then the filesystem 
> drivers "just work." You would want to write a small "blkfront" driver and 
> see exactly how little code you can get away with.

Yeah, I had started to look at using the filesystem drivers for use in
pygrub -- there's a lot of grub2 which is less applicable for
bootstrapping a domU, but re-inventing the wheel of filesystem reading
code is overkill.

Jeremy


_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel