Re: multiboot2

[Kevin Lacquement <kevin@lacqui.com>]

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phcoder wrote:

[...]

> 4) "This tag should contain a string that enables operating systems to
> distinguish between different bootloaders and different versions of the
> same bootloader."
> Parsing strings may be difficult. Perhaps we could include a version tag
> with a format dependent on bootloader and optionally a requirement that
> higher numbers are newer versions?

By my understanding, the name is defined by the bootloader.  All Grub
has to do is check if it starts with "GRUB" (or whatever
name/capitalization we define), and skip otherwise.  If, for example, it
starts with "LILO", we can skip the entire tag and not worry about
parsing LILO's version numbers.

With that, you also don't need to worry about "higher numbers are newer
version", as we can determine our own versioning, and load appropriate
features.


> 7) Command line tag. I propose to reserve the identifier 0x0005 for
> command line and make it the same format as "Boot Loader Name" but
> arguments shouldn't include kernel image name. This way we would prevent
> OSes from trying to access this file by bootloader-specific name. In
> addition in both "Boot Loader Name" and "Command-line" we should specify
> the encoding to be utf-8

I'm not really understanding what you're saying here.  Are you proposing
that the OS lets us know what command-line options it allows, for use in
tab completion?  Or that they're listing the default command line (for
editing perhaps?)  Or am I thinking in the wrong direction here?

-- 
Sic non confunctus, non reficiat.


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