!Boot

It would be nice to be able to easily replace !Boot from your installation CD or whatever (due to mistaken, malicious and/or hardware corruption) without any implications. This currently isn’t possible because applications make use of various locations inside !Boot, choices, resources, scrap & system spring to mind.

Would it make sense to split off these locations to some other central repository (Local, !Settings or something) which could be backed up by the user like any other personal data.

Hopefully this could be done in a transparent way with the clever use of paths etc so applications won’t see any difference.

Any thoughts? Actually, I guess this reveals quite a fundamental point – why was !Boot ever provided on disc rather than ROM? Was it just to save space on the ROMs? Is there a case for the parts which only ever need to be read-only being placed in ROM - now that space isn’t such an issue?

Adam

I strongly agree with the thrust of this wish: !Boot has become unwieldy and sprawling, and a source of many problems. Although I’ve not many bright ideas myself, a radical simplification of the !Boot structure, preserving as much compatibility as possible, would be desirable. Ideally some kind of audit should be done of all the various Obey files and modules cluttering it up. Some functionality could be transferred to ROM, some consolidated with !Boot, perhaps even some removed. The cleaner and simpler !Boot is, the better, IMO.

The starting point will be us releasing the existing sources to the current RISC OS 5 Universal Boot Structure (some of which is slated for the Batch One release). We should eventually be at the point where the current release of the boot sequence is available as a tarball archive from this site (or whoever else wants to host it).

As for simplifying !Boot, I’m all for that. BUT you would have to be very careful; I know from experience that a good deal of the complexity in the boot sequence is cludging and addressing issues in the multitude of different OS versions that the sequence needs to support. It’s easy to imagine a nice, clean boot sequence but you’ll soon get frustrated when you try it on older machines. The OS fork has made that job even more complex.

So it’s definitely one of those tasks where changes should first be discussed on these forums before anyone invests effort in making changes that someone else knows a good reason not to do.

It’s easy to imagine a nice, clean boot sequence but you’ll soon get frustrated when you try it on older machines.

Why would a !Boot suitable for the ROOL OS have to be capable of loading on e.g. RISC OS 3.1?

Adam

(Resurrection of an old but relevant thread)

BQ. Why would a !Boot suitable for the ROOL OS have to be capable of loading on e.g. RISC OS 3.1?

It probably wouldn’t, but it would be nice if provision were made to allow support for non ROOL versions to be added if someone chose to do it.

The only situation that it would need to support non ROOL RISC OS is if a softload were being done on a RISC PC (etc). But partition support would negate the need for this. (ie RO 5 !boots from a second partition, the ROM OS !boots from the “primary”)