On 10/29/2013 05:00 PM, Robie Basak wrote:
On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 04:11:53PM -0600, Stephen Warren wrote:
I don't rememeber if this came up the last time we discussed bootloader standardization, but there's a spec:
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/BootLoaderSpec/
... which sounds like it'd be interesting if all bootloaders going forward implemented, and all distros assumed. Pengutronix had a nice demo of this at their booth at ELCE.
Interesting, thanks!
I'm not sure that this is quite relevant to the current question, though. The spec presupposes UEFI, which itself is an example of the spec that I'm after. But, AIUI, we can't quite do this today (though I appreciate that support is in the works - thank you Leif and Roy).
Perhaps it's worded assuming UEFI, but I'm pretty sure it either doesn't actually require UEFI in practice, or that there's an extension to that spec being pushed that adapts it to non-UEFI environments. As I mentioned, Pengutronix had a demo of it running at ELCE, and IIRC they were using Barebox not UEFI as the bootloader.
The following is where I got the link to the spec from http://mindlinux.wordpress.com/2013/10/25/barebox-and-the-bootloader-specifi...
In the case of shipping an Ubuntu cloud guest image, for example, I think it's safe to assume that this image won't dual-boot with another distribution.
For me, the interesting part of that spec isn't the multi-distribution-co-existence aspect, but simply the fact that it's a bootloader-independant format for specifying a list of kernels/... to boot. While the spec supports the co-existence stuff, I guess there's no specific need to distros to care about this; they just install the appropriate config files for their own kernels/filesystems, and are done.