Re: Further step in GRUB - Environment

[Thierry Laronde]

On Sat, Mar 03, 2001 at 11:07:29PM +0100, Christoph Plattner wrote:
> Hello Mr. OKUJI and all other GRUB people,
> 
>       I want to start a discussion on GRUB concerning managing
> the environment. This topic is NOT subject of the release 1.0 of GRUB.
> 
> We began to discuss on this subject one year ago. My idea was to have a
> management of an machine global environment as for example OpenBoot of
> a SUN workstation does.

IMHO, to have environment variables is something that we can think about.
But I don't think (_in the future_) that this is the first thing to think about.

One of the main problem is being able to dynamically allocate memory.
Without that, a real symbol table can't be implemented.

Secondly, this implies a lot of work since, obviously, the command line
needs to be parsed a first time to replace any occurrence of a variable,
etc... So almost all the way the cmdline and run_script are handled must be
reworked.

Finally, the size of GRUB is still a main concern, because the place where
all the features of GRUB are the more useful is when trying to install a new
OS (simply because you must face unknown situations), but, when using
floppies, the place is a problem. So one can think about a kind of GRUB
executable, getting rid of the interpreter. But this leads to the problem of
modules, etc...

All I want to say is that, IMHO, there are lot of features that can be
thought about, but that we can't think about every piece alone : the major
concern is to discuss, after 1.0 has been released, what is the general
architecture of the GRUB. Once this is done, it will be more easy to discuss
about the implementation of different parts belonging to an unique plan.

Cheers,
-- 
Thierry LARONDE, Centre de Ressources Informatiques, Archamps - France
http://www.cri74.org
PingOO, serveur de com sur distribution GNU/Linux: http://www.pingoo.org