Re: RE: [PATCH] Xen Grub-style boot loader

[Jacob Gorm Hansen <jacobg@diku.dk>]

Ian Pratt wrote:
>>It's a simple grub style ncurses application.  This is my 
>>ncurses app so 
>>it's probably even easier than what I did.  It parses a 
>>grub.conf file 
>>and let's a user pick an entry.
> 
> 
> I think to be useful this would need to run within the guest domain such that the grub menu appeared over the guest console connection. We'd have to use something akin to a real bootloader (but 32bit) to pull in the image and jump at it. Using linux with a suitable initrd and kexec might be a good soloution.
> 
> I'm not sure that the interactive selection of kernels is the #1 requirement here -- I think its more about being able to read the kernel from the domain's file system, and to be able to control the command line options. 

I have some code for pulling in a Linux ELF image via UIP-TCP under 
Xen1.3, unpacking it and jumping at it, if anyone is interested. The 
total bootloader binary is 30kb.

The networking driver needs to be ported to Xen 2.0, but otherwise it 
should just work.

Jacob


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