New Boot Loader Menu

[Devin Teske]

On Oct 7, 2012, at 1:48 PM, Julian Elischer wrote:

> On 10/7/12 12:52 PM, Garrett Cooper wrote:
>> I'd like to see sketches or a general idea of what you have in mind before investing too much time in a direction that doesn't bear a lot of fruit. I'm sure others here agree.
> It'd be interesting to see if we could get a boot loader that has an option to boot a backup
> image, or maybe off network.. I know that by the time we got this far we are supposed to be
> beyond that, but who knows what is actually possible.
> 
> I'd love to see a picoBSD image available for booting in emergencies. Whether in it's own partition,
> or just a file in the root partition (or wherever) that can be loaded as a root filesystem.
> having the ability to recover from really bad screwups is why you need the menus in the first place usually.
> 
> not sure what is really possible.
> 

*huge smiles*

Have you been talking to old VICORians about what I've been working on here? haha

It's like you stole a page out of my playbook.

I've been working on this for years (slowly making the infrastructure changes in DruidBSD to accommodate this, and slowly trying to work that code back into FreeBSD).

NOTE: DruidBSD at it's core (when it's not being re-purposed as a multi-media FreeBSD universal installation platform) is actually smaller than PicoBSD.

In the past month, I used DruidBSD maybe 5-dozen times to rescue an unbootable system. Which system? the system I was developing the boot loader on (haha).

Everytime I would make a mistake (and subsequently end up in BTX halt, panic free guard1, or other fatal condition), I simply reboot, boot DruidBSD, and within 3 keystrokes I have my system mounted read-write with all the tools I need to fix it. In less than 20 seconds, I've often corrected my mistake and have a working system again.

NOTE: You can try it out yourself. I made publicly-available the latest version recently as part-of the FreeBSD-9.0_Druid-1.0b57.iso up on druidbsd.sf.net (boot the ISO, select "freebsd", then select "Interactive Disk Repair Shell" and answer guided questions to create a working environment copacetic to fixing even the worst situations). It even has a mode where it will start SSHD from the boot media so that *someone-ELSE* can log in remotely and fix your non-bootable system (which we've had to use before -- it's a real life-saver when someone in Manila for example has no FreeBSD knowledge but can at least boot a system with a CD and answer some basic questions).

Here's a screenshot that shows that DruidBSD has had the ability to swap out the root filesystem image with a "rescue image" for nearly a decade (this one screenshot taken 3 years ago):

http://twitpic.com/16spp2

-- 
Devin

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