[OLPC-devel] Boot menus and other fun topics

[Jordan Crouse]

Greetings all - 

So, I'm happy to finally announce that I've worked up a prototype for a
graphical boot menu for the ROM image, and I've extended buildrom
accordingly.  Now, the user is presented with a pretty menu with four icons
that select different boot options.  The boot menu itself is really just
a very simple app that shows the icons and traps the arrow keys.  When the
enter key is pressed, the boot menu will return a value of 0 to 3, matching the
selected icon.

All the other intelligence is the boot script that checks the return value 
of the boot menu and handles the desired option.  Currently, only the
two icons to the right are supported (kexec from USB key, and shell on the
serial console). 

I'm throwing this out there so that people can give it a look and comment
accordingly.   There are two ways to see the action:

You can grab the latest version of buildrom (the default build is now
busybox + bootmenu + kbl w/ ron's patch) and build it into LinuxBIOS

Or, you can just download the bootmenu code yourself and
play with it on any 16 bit framebuffer:

http://dev.laptop.org/~jcrouse/bootmenu-0.1.tar.gz

As an aside, since there are many out there without access to a framebuffer,
if anybody knows how to make vesafb work with QEMU, please let me know.

Jordan

PS: Thanks to Christopher Blizzard and his crack graphics team for the 
pretty artwork.  Don't think for one moment think I can draw like that.

-- 
Jordan Crouse
Senior Linux Engineer
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
<www.amd.com/embeddedprocessors>