[LinuxBIOS] reliable boot loader

joe at smittys.pointclark.net joe at smittys.pointclark.net
Fri Mar 30 17:49:18 CEST 2007


Quoting Capt Beany <captbeany at yahoo.co.uk>:

> Following a failed kernel upgrade of a remote linux
> box im looking for a replacement to my current boot
> loader (GRUB) that will fall back to a previous kernel
> if the new one is corrupt and was wondering if filo
> could fit the bill (either as is or with some changes)
> ?
>
> The system in question has software raided disk for
> redunancy but this doesnt help when the boot kernel is
> corrupt.
>
> What I hope to achieve is that once the boot loader is
> running, it will scan the systems boot devices for
> files containing boot information (the files would
> either be text files with a known extension or binary
> files with a magic number) that contain the
> kernel/ramdisk filenames, the kernel/ramdisk
> checksums, a boot priority and the checksum of the
> file itself.
>
> It should then be possible to select the highest
> priority kernel/ramdisk to boot, checksum it and if
> this checksum fails fall back to the next
> kernel/ramdisk pair.
>
> Does this sound like a reasonable approach to the
> problem ?
>
>
>
Have you checked out the nuni bootloader?

http://freshmeat.net/projects/nuni/

It is a bios independent bootloader that has fallback boot methods.
I am not sure what this has to do with LinuxBIOS??

But hey it is open source, and again bios independent, possible payload??

Thanks  - Joe




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