New bootloader!

[Scott Long]

All,

I've written a nice little bootloader front-end script that allows one
to enable/disable acpi, boot single users, etc.  My primary motivation
was to allow users to easily disable ACPI, since so many problems are
popping up these days with it.  Making the disabling of ACPI sticky is
not that hard to do, probably a few lines of sh scripts in rcNG, but I
haven't gotten to it yet.  To use the new loader, grab it from

http://people.freebsd.org/~scottl/beastie.4th

and place it in /boot.  Then copy frames.4th and screen.4th from
/usr/share/examples/bootforth into /boot.  Then edit /boot/loader.rc
with the following diff.  WARNING: if any mistakes are made and the
script cannot start, it might leave your loader unable to load the
kernel.  In case of problems, either keep a fixit floppy handy, or
recompile your kernel with embedded hints (so that things like the
console will work) and load it from the boot1 loader.

I'm really hoping to have this be on at least the i386 bootcd for 5.1,
so any feedback is appreciated.

Scott

--- loader.rc.orig      Sun May 25 22:10:03 2003
+++ loader.rc   Sun May 25 22:10:47 2003
@@ -12,3 +12,14 @@

  \ Unless set otherwise, autoboot is automatic at this point

+\ Load our little menu
+s" /boot/beastie.4th" O_RDONLY fopen dup fload fclose
+
+\ Initialize loader.4th stuff
+
+\ cr cr .( Initializing loader.4th...)
+initialize drop
+
+\ Show the menu
+\ cr
+beastie-start