RE: [Xen-devel] boot loaders for domain != 0

[Jeremy Katz <katzj@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2005-02-03 at 17:28 +0000, Ian Pratt wrote:
> > > We could also access a config file within the guest's 
> > virtual disk that
> > > could be used to override a subset of the config parameters (e.g.
> > > command line, kernel image name etc).
> > 
> > Parsing a grub.conf is easy enough that you're probably just 
> > as well off
> > reading it from dom0 and parsing it to determine what the 
> > right thing to
> > boot is.  You can even do it without mounting by using something like
> > libext2fs.  Going really all out would then make it so that when you
> > first started a guest domain, you'd be presented with a menu to pick
> > what you want (based on the boot loader config), just like you would
> > with a normal machine.  
> 
> Yep, grub.conf wouldn't be a bad config format to use, though it's
> obviously not as flexible as ourcurrent config file that enable varibles
> etc.
> 
> Using libext2fs would be nice from a security POV (it's probably not too
> hard to crash Linux getting it to mount a suitably crafted filesystem
> structure), but it doesn't help if the client is using XFS or Reiserfs
> etc (though I'm not sure Grub supports these anyhow). Perhaps insisting
> on an ext3 /boot is OK.

grub will support them, and there are libraries for most of the other
filesystems too.  Doing things such that other filesystems can be
plugged in would be reasonable, but for a first pass, ext[23] /boot is
probably reasonable.  

Jeremy



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