[coreboot] FILO 1.0 vision

Alex Mauer hawke at hawkesnest.net
Mon Sep 15 23:03:39 CEST 2008


Joseph Smith wrote:
> 
> 
> On Sat, 13 Sep 2008 10:55:55 -0400, Joseph Smith <joe at settoplinux.org>
> wrote:
>> Attached is a little ditty of my vision for FILO 1.0.
>> Feedback is welcome.
>>
> I haven't gotten any feedback on this yet, what does everyone think?

In general, I like it.

Comments:

Numbered prompts.  A curses-style menu might look nicer, if it's practical.

Manual boot vs. commandline.  First, I thank a manual boot should drop
out of the curses-type interface into a more normal command prompt.
(what we now call the grub-style interface).  Second, those functions
are basically the same, so no need to separate them.  Just have the
default "manual boot" value be the configured commandline value.

Location of filo.conf.  If it turns out to be impractical to store the
full filo.conf location in flash or CMOS, having a hardcoded path with
selectable drive would be good alternative. (and storing just the drive
in NVRAM would certainly be reasonable.)

New automatic boot interface: It should prompt for a specific keystroke
to interrupt the autoboot, not just say "you have 5 seconds".  Delete
would be a good option, for consistency with vendor BIOSes.

Settings menu: It might be good to take a page from the BIOS vendors
here, and have curses-style settings.  e.g. up/down to select; space,
left/right, text entry to change a setting; display a text description
of the currently-selected option near the bottom of the screen.  Boot
method: Manual [configured commandline], Menu [configured filo.conf
location], Boot timeout [number]

filo.conf boot: I especially think it would be better to stick with the
grub-style menu here

-Alex Mauer "hawke"





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