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

To: Ian Pratt <m+Ian.Pratt@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] boot loaders for domain != 0
From: Anthony Liguori <anthony@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2005 12:49:53 -0600
Cc: Jeremy Katz <katzj@xxxxxxxxxx>, Andy Whitcroft <apw@xxxxxxxxxxxx>, xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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Ian Pratt wrote:

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.

Ian
I contemplated doing this for not just grub but also for ISOLinux so that you could boot off of a CDROM. A really intelligent loader would determine which Kernel the system is trying to load (i.e. 2.6.10 vs. 2.4.23) and load an appropriate Xen kernel.

I looked into it a bit and it wouldn't be terribly hard to support boot splash screens either. Like Jeremy, this is on my TODO list but I figured I look into this after getting a new set of management tools (since this is mostly management-level stuff).

For what it's worth, I think doing a quick mount, read, and then umount is the easiest approach since it extends well to doing things like peeking at an ISO's contents by mounting an ISO image. Using libraries would probably introduce some nasty dependencies without really gaining much...

Regards,

--
Anthony Liguori
anthony@xxxxxxxxxxxxx



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