New Boot Loader Menu

[Julian Elischer]

On 10/7/12 2:10 PM, Devin Teske wrote:
>
> 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.

Pico, or Nano?
I know that Pico no longer fits on a single floppy but it's still 
pretty damned small.

>
> 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).

so, the question is, were does the boot come from and where does it 
load the image from?  usb-key?
>
> 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.

to some extent I'd like to see some recoverability like this for 
default freeBSD. even the old "create a bootable usb fixit-key" during 
install might be enough.
(keep it in an envelope taped to the side of the machine :-).

>
> 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 <http://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).
true, though I'd like to see if it can be done without the whole extra 
CD..

>
> 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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