Re: failsafe booting (again)

[Alessandro Rubini]

The idea to somehow control boot operation without human interaction
is an interesting one. Actually, one of the reasons I got to use grub
is to be able to hack in my code more easily -- tried several times to
understand lilo's internals but gave up after hours.

What I personally want to do is enabling the boot loader to read some
input and use that information to choose the default menu entry. This
way I can boot one of several entries without the need to hook
anything to the computer, not even a serial port. This facility is
something I have been needing for several years; after not being able
to hack lilo now I'm very low on time to do that on grub.

Is someone else interested in this kind of functionality? Is there
some hope to get it included in the official grub, if it's general
enough -- when I finally get to implement it?

The idea is just to read an input port, it's up to the user to bind a
switch to the parallel, serial or joystick port, or whether to connect
active devices to those input pins.

/alessandro