multi-boot bootstrap?

[Super Bisquit]

Now, how are you going to multiboot OpenBSD and NetBSD on a PowerPC machine
from the same hard disk. From what I know, one or the other can only be as
the first entry and it then has to be set from the forth prompt.
So, you will need two disks to boot , saya: OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Linux,
and MacOSX or a combination of these.

On PPC boxes with OpenFirmware 3.x, you actually need to set the active
partition if you want to boot Linux and/or freebsd from the forth prompt if
both are on the same disk.

You would need to reprogram the OpenBoot prompt on the UltraSPARC boxes.
No one on the FreeBSD hacker list does any forth programming. If such was
true, I would have had a few questions answered long ago.


On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 2:04 PM, <dieterbsd at engineer.com> wrote:

> The discussion of a new bootloader reminded me of the
> following problem:
>
> What we need more than a new bootloader is a new bootstrap.
> With MBR, NetBSD's boot selector MBR works reasonably well.
> (About as well as can be expected given the limited space available.)
> You get a menu of partitions ("slices" in FreeBSD-speak)
> and can enter a number to select which one you want to boot.
> If you don't enter anything it times out and boots the default.
> You can boot a different disk by pressing F1, F2, F3 ...
>
> example:
>        Fn: diskn
>        1: NBSD4.0
>        2: NB5.0.1
>        3: FBSD7.1
>        4: FBSD8.2
>
> The menu labels are limited to 7 chars due to the limited space
> available in the MBR.
>
> But, disks larger than 2 GiB need to be GPT rather than MBR.
> I haven't found a bootstrap with similar functionality for GPT.
>
> GPT allows a larger bootstrap than MBR.  So the bootstrap can
> be nicer.  Firmware disk numbering is completely insane on some
> machines.  So spare the poor user from having to guess which
> disk is which number today.  Go through all the disks and look
> for bootable partitions.  Extract the GPT partition labels for
> these partitions.  Present a menu of choices.
>
> example:
>        Enter the menu number for the partition you wish to boot.
>        The default will automatically boot in 5 seconds.
>
>        1: FreeBSD 7.1
>        2: FreeBSD 8.2 (default)
>        3: NetBSD 4.0
>        4: NetBSD 5.0.1
>        5: OpenBSD
>        6: Plan 9
>        7: reboot back to firmware
>
>        Boot:
>
> As with the boot loader, this needs to work on all machines,
> and all terminals (without having termcap/terminfo), so just plain
> ASCII text, no graphics.
>
>
>
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