A call for boot loader IDs

Is this something we should care about for PALO ?

Helge

---------- Forwarded Message ----------

Subject: A call for boot loader IDs
Date: Friday 05 December 2003 17:38
From: "H. Peter Anvin" <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]

Hi all,

So far only a small number of boot loaders have actually officially registered their IDs, this is the list that I have:

type_of_loader:
If your boot loader has an assigned id (see table below), enter 0xTV here, where T is an identifier for the boot loader and V is a version number. Otherwise, enter 0xFF here.

Assigned boot loader ids:
0 LILO
1 Loadlin
2 bootsect-loader
3 SYSLINUX
4 EtherBoot
5 ELILO

Please contact <[email protected]> if you need a bootloader ID value assigned.

I would really appreciate if other boot loaders -- especially GRUB, which is widely used -- would let me know (a) what they are currently doing, and (b) whether or not they need an official allocation. It's probably unwise to not do so, at least for the ones which have a significant user community.

The purpose of this ID is so we can work around individual boot loader issues if we should have a need to adjust or change the boot protocol. Not reporting a unique ID makes this impossible.

-hpa

This sounds _very_ x86-centric :)

Sure, but at least ELILO is iA64.

Helge

it's for any EFI platform. and intel wants to push EFI for x86 aswell.