Fallback Enhancement Patch

[Daniel Eisner]

Hello all,

     The current state of the "fallback" command is that you can use it to boot
back to a fail-safe config if the default one doesn't work anymore. This is
quite a useful feature of grub -- especially since you can have it do things
like look for its config on a tftp server, and fail-safe back to its local disk
if that doesn't work.

     Unfortunately, the fallback command only works once at present. That is you
can only have 2 possible boot option for an automated boot -- the default and
its fallback. It would be much more useful if you could have an unlimited number
of fallbacks -- ie "try this. Didn't work, try this. didn't work? Try this..."
etc. Here is a trivial patch which gives the fallback command that capability by
allowing it to be used in the menu items, in addition to the menu setup section
of the config file. This means that each menu choice can have its own fallback
option. You can chain fallbacks together this way. In a large-scale environment,
you can use this to:

          - Have one menu.lst boot different types of machines with different
partition tables
          - Have grub look for its config file on multiple tftp servers (for
high availability)
          - Probably other things I didn't think of


     I have included a [trivial] patch against the 0.92 release which gives the
fallback command this capability. Does this seem like something which should be
part of Grub-mainstream to everyone else?

     -Dan

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

          Securities Industry Automation Corporation
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

           Daniel Eisner                       New Technologies
   phone: 212-383-5532             HTTP://www.siac.com
email: address@hidden



(See attached file: grub-0.92-rc1.patch)

grub-0.92-rc1.patch
Description: Binary data