Re: Xen bootloader (was: Re: [Xen-devel] Xen Roadmap proposal)

[John Levon <levon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Jul 14, 2006 at 04:20:59PM +0100, Mark Williamson wrote:

> Of these, Linux supports: Minix, FAT*, Minix, Reiser, JFS, XFS  I understand 
> that the Linux UFS driver can support a number of filesystems, including 
> BSD's FFS.  I think there's some support for Solaris' UFS in there also.  The 
> UFS driver had experimental write support last time I checked, but all that's 
> really needed is basic read support to scrape the kernel off the disk.
> 
> There's also a Summer of Code project to make ZFS available as a FUSE 
> filesystem, which grub can't support (at the moment...).  But until Solaris 
> uses ZFS as a root fs this probably doesn't matter so much.

It means every OS with a file system that's not a Linux one will
typically have to write it two times more: for grub, and for Linux
(along with making Linux actually work well enough). And of course this
doubles the support/maintenance matrix as well.

> > I'm still not clear on why this
> > is a preferable approach to modifying grub?
> 
> It's not necessarily a replacement for grub, but I think it'd be good to 
> consider as an interim measure or as an alternative (there are already 
> patches for kexec-under Xen floating around, so all we'd need to do in 
> principle is to compile a kboot_sl ramdisk and run with it).

As an interim solution it might be OK, sure.

regards
john

_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel