There's probably an argument to be made for a lean bootloader/kernel that does minimal work - and for a os kernel that's more general. But with network boot (ethernet, WiFi stack, network stack, one or more network transports ((t)ftp, nfs?..) and support for encryption... The line does blur.
Might be worth it to have minimal Linux "profile" that support "booting" other Linux via kexec.
But then, will you boot nt, freedos, bsd and minix via kexec too?
> There's probably an argument to be made for a lean bootloader/kernel that does minimal work - and for a os kernel that's more general.
We had that in Linux; it was called LILO (Linux loader), consisting of a 512 byte machine language program run from the boot sector which would load a canned sequence of more sectors, a slightly larger program, which would then load a kernel image from a sector map.
Before that, generations of machines going back to the dawn of computing had minimal bootstrap sequences.
But, on the flipside, idea of more capable boot firmware precedes Linux by probably ten years if not more, like on Sun workstations and whatnot.
Booting via kexec is the intended idea here. Theoretically, it should be possible to boot any other OS with kexec. We may have to test that assumption for this project...
Might be worth it to have minimal Linux "profile" that support "booting" other Linux via kexec.
But then, will you boot nt, freedos, bsd and minix via kexec too?