New Boot-Loader

[John Baldwin]

On Monday, March 28, 2011 12:48:03 am Devin Teske wrote:
> Hi fellow hackers,
> 
> I'm designing an open-sourced replacement boot-loader for FreeBSD. I feel 
that the existing options in the boot-loader menu today can be whittled down 
significantly with a stateful menu system rather than a single-action item 
menu system.

Are you reimplementing loader from scratch or just hacking on the 4th scripts 
to display the menu, etc.?

> In designing the new menu, I'd like to get your opinions. From old:
> 
> 	FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE: twitpic.com/4e485w
> 
> to new:
> 
> 	Replacement Boot-Loader: twitpic.com/4e46ol
> 
> NOTE: The final release will have a single-user mode option.
> 
> The new menu allows for more flexibility as selecting options 2 ("Boot 
Verbose") or 3 ("ACPI Support") independently toggles the status, updates the 
menu item, and redisplays the menu -- ever-waiting until the user ultimately 
presses ENTER, "1", or escapes to the prompt and types "boot". Thus, one could 
potentially launch single-user mode with verbosity on and ACPI disabled (if 
one so desired).

This is good.  I think DFly already does this and I had a low priority item on 
my todo list to eventually implement this in the current menu myself.

-- 
John Baldwin