ollie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Andrew Ip wrote: > > >>- Boot from floppy > >>- Boot from IDE hard drive > >>- Boot from SCSI hard drive > >> > >- Boot from USB hard drive > >- Boot from 1394 hard drive > > > Nah, actually we should say: > > Boot from any URL. (file://, http://, ftp://) > > with > > Kernel Image in any binary format (ELF, GZIP, COFF) > > I found the most basic problem of current bootloaders (GRUB, Etherboot, even > LinuxBIOS) is that > they focus too much in low-level implementation detail. The overall design looks > > like it is implemented > in assembly, no a higher level language called C. The designer does not use much > > data abstraction, > or OO techinques you can found in modern O.S. kernel. This makes adding a new > feature into the > bootloader very diffcult.
Good call. If we want to do interesting things with the bootloader we need to be flexible, and easily modifiable. It is a hard problem to write infrastructure that does that but it is certainly worth exploring. My addition. In the bootloader we can configure out anything we don't need, and we the required core be as small as possible. Eric
