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Re: Re: second-stage bootloader for Thecus N2100?



hi,

as loic pointed out, i wrote a little (very ugly yet ... dont look to
deep at the sed commands, its really just a proof of concept weekend
hackery) script that can parse a file and display a menu on a
framebuffer or serial console ...

the script is based on the assumption that you have an absolute minimal
kernel that has framebuffer suport for your target device as well as
support for all possible disk controllers that are available on the
target device builtin. all filesystem modules that might be used
for /boot should be modules in the initramfs. 
the idea was to steal (or source) the probing functions from ubuntus
casper script so it loops over the attached disks in order to find a
parseable file (in case of the actual script thats /boot/grub/menu.lst
because i'm lazy and our kernel packages have an automatic hook that
calls update-grub if available, that way i could avoid having to write
anything on the OS side and just copy over update-grub from x86 to
generate kernel lists for me) the file could as well be a syslinux.cfg
or even isolinux.cfg file so you could boot isos or vfat based usb keys
or could be something totally new.

if the script found the right kernel it will then take the entries from
the file to assemble a kexec commandline to actually boot the OS.

indeed the script could be used on serial consoles as well as on sshed
connections, that really depends on the minimal base kernel you build
(which you will have to do for any supported board out there anyway) and
on the stuff you include in your initramfs.

the script was written and tested under ash so should run without any
prob in busybox, to test it you can just download it from [1] and run it
in a terminal as long as you have a /boot/grub/menu.lst file
available ...

ciao
	oli

[1] http://people.ubuntu.com/~ogra/arm/bootmenu

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