Re: About grub feature

[Christoph Plattner]

I have to say, that I don't know very much of Sun boot monitor, except
for that, the I called help and read about the commands on my
workstation (Sun SparcStation 5). But what I could see, that it is
possible to setup enviornmental settings. This is the only thing I
miss under GRUB. On the target machines in the company, one module
loaded by GRUB includes a text file containing the environment like

HOST=hugo
NETMASK=255.255.255.0

or whatever. I miss a possibility to edit those settings directly.
One way of course is to implement a mini editor for (text based) 
loaded modules, but this is not the point.

The point is, that I miss something like an "environment" known
by GRUB and prepared for the loaded OS, which can be set, changed,
and which is stored like on a NV-RAM or EEPROM (of course, here
we need some space on disk (?)).

On the other hand, all OSes running on a PC "know" that the PC has
no environment (except the BIOS setup of course). So for PC OSes
this stuff is out of scope (except for our OS in the company...)

But it would be a nice enhancement to support also an environment
block additional to the command line parameters ....

This only should be a "kick" for our design brain stroming... this
is no requirement !

With friendly regards

        Christoph P.


OKUJI Yoshinori wrote:
> 
>   I comment on the issue a bit. As Christoph pointed out, one of the
> features in GRUB is that it is (relatively) user-friendly. And, we
> say, "GRUB is useful for experts like OS developers
> simultaneously". But is the latter really true?
> 
>   The strategy used in GRUB is to _pass information_ about hardware
> and user input data to an OS image, while the strategy used in both
> Open Firmware and EFI is to _give interfaces_ to access hardware. In
> other words, GRUB provides higher level interfaces to an OS image than
> Open Firmware or EFI. I think our strategy is more convenient, but I'm
> not sure if it is enough.
> 
>   If you have spare time (I don't have, for now), investigate Open
> Firmware and/or EFI, and compare them with the Multiboot Specification
> and GRUB's interfaces. Such a study will be helpful in the future.
> 
> Okuji

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