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).
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.
But what I do want to know is that I can ship a disk image with a GPT and UEFI grub installed, that grub configured to use a particular kernel and initrd from inside the disk image, and that every guest (eg. OpenStack, libvirt) on every OS, and Xen, will be able to boot it. If everything in the stack we need is ready in time (v7, v8, qemu mach-virt if we settle on that, etc), then we can use that. Otherwise, we'll need to do something else for cloud guest images, since right now OpenStack, libvirt and qemu are the targets.
For this goal, I don't think managing multiple distributions on the same disk is in scope.
Robie