document updated 14 years ago, on Sep 8, 2009
generally
Grub4dos is my hero. Grub4dos didn't hold back at all. It accomplishes things most other bootloaders don't even think are possible. (no other bootloader can initiate from kexec, only one other can do MEMDISK-style things, none other can directly chainload io.sys or NTLDR)
I want WWB to act like that, but more. WWB can do many things that grub4dos can't, because it has a full OS at its disposal, and thus considerable amounts of pre-existing code to leverage. So WWB's ambition should be even more limitless.
specifically
Broadly, it should be able to "boot any bootable file available on the web", regardless of what container that file is in:
- Linux-based
- inside an ISO
- inside a .zip, or .tar.gz, or .tar.bz2
- has an initrd or initramfs that needs to be modified before it can be booted
- MS-DOS/PC-DOS/FreeDOS based
- floppy images from UBCD
- floppy images from Hiren's (should it include a torrent downloader?? maybe too slow?)
- Windows-based
- I don't have as much experience with this, but there's lots of WinPE/BartPE stuff out there
And it should be able to take advantage of more of the local host's resources:
- ramdisk, but ONLY IF it has enough RAM
- swapfile, but ONLY IF one is already available on-disk
- extra space on an existing FAT/NTFS/EXTn partition, but ONLY IF the user consents to the use, since it implies a slight extra risk (could this be done by modifying the initrd/initramfs to do a loopback?)
- httpfs/nfs downloading chunks as-needed, and otherwise dump things out of memory for a tradeoff in extra bandwidth, but ONLY IF the machine has a fast enough network connection
And it should be able to do more "introspection", ie. have more smarts, to be able to automagically figure more things out on its own
- point it at mod_autoindex directory, and it'll offer ALL available boot files from there for booting
- automatically figure out what filetype it's looking at (floppy image, HDD image, CD floppy-emu image, CD no-emu image, etc etc)
And hopefully it maintains the same breadth of initial-boot options that other bootloaders have. (CD/USB/HDD/PXE/NTLDR/...)
And hopefully it can remain as portable as Linux (lots) and GRUB2 (some)
(however, if it's truly reliant on grub4dos, then it's clearly restricted to x86)
guiding light
Basically:
- we do EVERYTHING we possibly can to boot as MANY different files available "in the wild" on the web as possible
- At the same time, we bend over backwards to make it appear to the user that all this hard work is actually a piece of cake. Make it appear to them as if this requires no effort on their part to accomplish.