New Boot Loader Menu

[Devin Teske]

On Oct 7, 2012, at 9:34 AM, Alexander Leidinger wrote:

> On Sat, 6 Oct 2012 16:48:50 -0700 Devin Teske
> <devin.teske at fisglobal.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hello,
>> 
>> I've been working on a new boot loader menu system.
>> 
>> This is what is in HEAD, CURRENT, and RELENG_9 at the moment:
>> 
>> http://twitpic.com/b1pkll/full
>> in color: http://twitpic.com/b1pkz1/full
>> 
>> 
>> I'd like to propose the following replacement to the above:
>> 
>> http://twitpic.com/b1pll5/full
>> in color: http://twitpic.com/b1plxi/full
>> 
>> The boot options have been whisked away into a sub-menu (see below):
>> 
>> http://twitpic.com/b1pm51/full
>> in color: http://twitpic.com/b1pme8/full
>> 
>> 
>> What does everybody think?
> 
> IMO single user mode should be in the first level. I never had to use
> the other options, but I often used single-user mode. Another reson is
> that we tell to install the world in single-user mode. While I've
> always installed the world in multi-user mode, we should make it
> easy/fast to do it the recommended way.
> 

The documentation on how to get into single-user mode would need to be changed from:

Press 's' and 'ENTER'

to instead:

Press 'o' then 's' then 'ENTER'

NOTE: The menu/submenu infrastructure hooks "ENTER" in at the lowest level possible, so at any time… ENTER == boot (regardless of whether a menu or submenu has a "Boot" menu item and/or regardless of whether any menuitem has hooked in the ASCII keycode for ENTER; ENTER == boot no matter where you are in the menu at any time). Thus, it is not required to "go back" to the main menu to boot -- you can jump to the options submenu, make your changes, and then boot with those options by pressing ENTER.

Please note that 16+ months ago we had to update the documentation for my last enhancement to the loader menu. It used to be:

Press 's'

and changed to:

Press 's' then 'ENTER'

because we went from a stateless menu system to a stateful menu system. The driving force behind that was indeed the fact that with the old stateless menu, you could not ever boot with combinations-of-options (but rather you could only boot with options that were presented -- unless of course you dropped to the interactive prompt and did the dirty work yourself).




> I see a lot of value for submenus to chose another boot device /
> partition, specially with ZFS boot environments.
> 

Agreed.

But it's when we add that submenu to the main menu that things now get so crowded that a redesign would be absolutely necessary if we were to add any other option.
-- 
Devin

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