I'm trying to modify GRUB to pause booting if a user presses a button that is connected to a USB<->Serial converter. This is a bit of an odd situation, so here's a quick overview:
On occasion, we need to allow end-users to pause booting to allow for HDD recovery. This can only happen before GRUB attempts to write to the HDD, otherwise the system stays broken. The system has no keyboard, but it does have hard buttons that send a serial message over an FTDI usb to serial converter. I have tried editing grub.cfg to insert the FTDI module, but I don't see exactly how to read data from an arbitrary serial port and continue on if there is no data on the serial line. There are also about 6 FTDIs on the system, so knowing which one to read from is important. My backup plan is to pause the boot for 30 seconds each time, but I'm trying to avoid that(plus the wait still has to happen before any data gets written to the disk). Is this possible to achieve, or would it require hacking of GRUB code directly? I'm using Ubuntu 12.04, dpkg reports that GRUB is 1.99-21ubuntu3.17. -Robert Middleton _______________________________________________ Help-grub mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-grub
