kernel memory checks on boot vs. boot time

[Alexander Best]

On Thu Mar 24 11, Andriy Gapon wrote:
> on 23/03/2011 22:50 Oliver Fromme said the following:
> > Beware, I don't know if this is the *only* thing preventing
> > boot2 from booting an amd64 kernel.  There might be more.
> > I haven't tried booting FreeBSD without the boot loader in
> > a long time.  Probably not in this century.
> 
> Kind of hijacking the thread - while we are gradually moving from mbr+bsdlabel
> to gpt and more, we are also moving from away from size-constrained boot2.
> My vision is that boot2 and loader should fuse into something more powerful that
> would reside in a boot partition, but with its config files on a "regular"
> filesystem.

+1. being able to control the whole boot process by /etc/boot.conf would be
great. there are defenately too many files in /boot. new users have no clue
what boot, boot0, boot1, boot2, cdboot, gptboot, etc. are all about.

merging /boot/loader, /boot/gptboot and /boot/zfsgptboot would be really nice.
building/installing all the mbr+bsdlabel boot files could be made dependable
upon some variable (WITH_MBR_BOOT=), which could be disabled by default.

also moving away from forth to something more modern might be thinkable. having
support for a modern scripting language might make it easier to come up with a
nice graphical bootloader e.g. there're probably more advantages.

problem might be that the current gpart(8) manual recommends using 64k for the
boot partition. that might not be enough, if ada0p1 should contain the
functionality of all boot stages (including the loader), support for a modern
scripting language and support for graphical menues (including a rudimentary
vga/vesa driver for high res).

cheers.
alex

> 
> -- 
> Andriy Gapon

-- 
a13x