Some ideas about new features of grub

[Bean]

Hi,

Here are some of my ideas about the new features of grub.

Move kernel to a module.
This make it possible to relocate the kernel. For example, we can use
it to move grub-pc to upper memory, and free conventional memory for
use by real mode os such as MS-DOS. grub can resides in memory even
after os take overs, and we can invoke it through interrupt hooks.

LUA integration.
LUA is quite powerful, it's more suitable to do complicated task than
sh script. For example, we can use it to detect os at runtime,
implement simple commands, or draw the graphic menu.

Read/Write file system support
We can implement two kind of fs drivers. The boot time driver is
read-only, but after entering normal mode, we can optionally load
another driver for write support. This approach has been used by EFI.
For example, it has a default FAT driver, but you can also load an
extended FAT driver
later.

Disk emulation.
Now that it has drivemap command, we can extended it to map hard disk
or cdrom image file, roughly equivalent to the memdisk of syslinux.

-- 
Bean