Date: 10 Mar 1996 06:26:18 GMT From: ksh@chop.ugcs.caltech.edu (Kevin S. Ho) To: mlist-freebsd-hackers@nntp-server.caltech.edu Subject: Re: When is 2.2 Estimated to be released? Message-ID: <KSH.96Mar9222619@chop.ugcs.caltech.edu> In-Reply-To: Jake Hamby's message of Sat, 9 Mar 1996 10:47:49 -0800 (PST) References: <freebsd.hackers.Pine.AUX.3.91.960309104522.4565A-100000@covina.lightside.com>
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>>>>> "Jake" == Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com> writes:
Jake> On Sat, 9 Mar 1996, Darren Reed wrote:
>> I don't think LILO is anywhere near as good as booteasy. For
>> one, there's only a Unix/Linux interface, AFAIK. Another, is
>> LILO doesn't give a menu (by default).
>>
>> I can boot everything but Linux with booteasy, across two HD's.
>> Why do we need LILO ? :-)
>>
>> darren
Jake> BootEasy is much better than LILO, especially since it
Jake> automagically adapts to new operating systems as you
Jake> add/remove them. With Linux, you need to reinstall LILO
Jake> every time you build a new kernel, for God's sake! In fact,
Jake> even with Linux, I'd rather use booteasy in the MBR, and
Jake> pass it over to LILO in the Linux root partition to boot
Jake> that operating system only.
The flaw in LILO is partially due to it's design, in that it is meant
to be all bootloaders, that is to say not only does it select partitions,
but it also, at the same time, selects kernels, and kernel options,
which causes the crockery inherent in it.
when lilo is first loaded, it pops itself up like a bootblock, and
then reads currently stored information about *everything*.
The benefit of having a booteasy/freebsd boot pair is that it
conceptually discriminates between the two (a partition selector,
and a bootimage selector), however, the bootimage selector is a
far more useable piece of software. It would be nice if instead
of the "here's a Fkey, decide", booteasy could be configured to
read named partitions, so that the most common ones can be called
by Fkey, but all can be called by name (like lilo), possibly
with tab completion/uniqueness (not full tab-to-difference
completion, but simple tabcomplete-if-unique), so it would print
something like this:
BootEasy 11.38.foo.bar
F1 - FreeBSD (hd0a) F2 - Linux (hd1ba) F3 - NetBSD (hd1b)
boot:
from here, one can press an Fkey, or type in a name of a
partition (bios type partition, not BSD slice), with naming
convention thusly:
[hf]d[0-9][a-(foo)]?
| | | \__ name of logical drive if the previous is
| | | an extended partition, otherwise nonexistent,
| | | it's incorrect regexp syntax, but doing it
| | | the fully correct way would be an eyesore
| | |
| | \__ the partition name (numbering goes 0-3 for primary)
| |
| \____ the drive number (bios)
|
\____ hard drive or floppy drive.
I'd actually be interested in helping to write this code, as I
think it would be a great improvement to the bootloader.
ksh
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