> > I guess what you should do is support a number of IPL > sections identified > by something of 4 bytes, say a number of 'slots' in the IPL > record. Either > learn zipl how to put things in these slots, or use a > separate userspace > program that can copy the first entry (written by zipl) to > one of the others. > And you probably could have different slots point to the same > image but use > different command line. > This is almost exactly what I had in mind. But, I couldn't decide how much of the LOADPARM field to use. We could even get down to 2 characters since the bootmap is currently limited to 256 entries. That would mean we could store a maximum of 128 different configs.
That might be too short though as it wouldn't be easy to remember. Then I thought, use the full 8 characters of the zipl.conf section name, but that seemd like a waste. So, you're suggestion of 4 might very well be a good middle of the road. A new value would have to be added to zipl.conf so the user could specify a "LABEL" that would be used for the LOADPARM. Another thing I couldn't decide on was what should happen if someone entered a LOADPARM that wasn't valid. Disabled wait or use whatever was coded in the "defaultboot" section? The latter could be very dangerous... Leland
