livecds in the future

[Sir Gallantmon]

On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 10:18 AM, Peter Jones <pjones at redhat.com> wrote:

> On 12/01/2009 10:42 AM, Sir Gallantmon wrote:
>
> > I found another tool that claims to be able to search and boot a USB
> device,
> > from a floppy disk no less! The tool is called PLoP[1], and it is a
> custom
> > boot manager that can boot USB, CD, and hard disks.
> >
> > Maybe that will help some people figure out how it is done.
> >
> > [1]: http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html
>
> That's pretty neat, but probably not much help to us.  What this is is a
> custom (proprietary, closed source, it seems) bootloader which basically
> does this:
>
> 1) installs what amounts to a DOS TSR driver for each of:
>  a) IDE (of some unspecified variety)
>  b) [EOU]HCI
>  c) ATAPI and similar (i.e. SCSI MMC/SBC command sets along with
>     encapsulation for CDROM and USB-storage)
>  d) notably not any SATA/AHCI/etc
> 2) acts as a chainloading boot loader for whatever bootloader is on
>   media that it finds.
>
> Which is also just a fancy way of saying it /replaces/ some of your BIOS's
> int 13h routines with what are plausibly slightly smarter (but also
> plausibly slightly dumber) ones.
>
> If somebody wants to implement an open source version of this, it could be
> helpful, I guess. But it's a lot of fairly difficult work, and the only
> real advantage it has over the other scheme I've discussed is that the CD
> (or whatever) you're booting from doesn't have to match the OS being
> booted.
>
> Anyway, if somebody's looking for a truly complex and isolating project to
> work on, go right ahead, but I'm not going to ;)
>
> --
>         Peter
>
> The Shuttle is now going five times the sound of speed.
>                -- Dan Rather, first landing of Columbia
>
>
Couldn't something like that be implemented into GRUB/GRUB2? Unlike PLoP,
GRUB doesn't really have a size restriction, so maybe smarter methods of
detection could be implemented.
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