Re: LUA boot loader coming very soon

On Mon, Feb 12, 2018 at 9:26 AM, Kris Moore <kris_at_ixsystems.com> wrote:

> On 02/12/2018 10:27, Warner Losh wrote:
> > Greetings,
> >
> > As you may know, the Lua (http://www.lua.org) boot loader has been in
> the
> > works for some time. It started out life as a GSoC in 2014 by Pedro Souza
> > mentored by Wojciech A. Koszek. Rui Paulo created a svn project branch to
> > try to integrate it. I rebased that effort into a github branch which
> Pedro
> > Arthur fixed up. Over the past year, I've been cleaning up the boot
> loader
> > for other reasons, and found the time was ripe to start integrating this
> > into the tree. However, those integration efforts have taken a while as
> my
> > day-job work on the boot loader took priority. In the mean time, Ed Maste
> > and the FreeBSD Foundation funded Zakary Nafziger to enhance the original
> > GSoC Lua scripts to bring it closer to parity with the evolution of the
> > FORTH menu system since the GSoC project started.
> >
> > I'm pleased to announce that all these threads of development have
> > converged and I'll be pushing the FreeBSD Lua Loader later today. This
> > loader uses Lua as its scripting language instead of FORTH. While
> > co-existance is planned, the timeline for it is looking to be a few weeks
> > and I didn't want to delay pushing this into the tree for that.
> >
> > To try the loader, you'll need to build WITHOUT_FORTH=yes and
> > WITH_LOADER_LUA=yes. Fortunately, you needn't do a full world to do this,
> > you can do it in src/stand and install the result (be sure to have the
> > options for both the build and the install). This will replace your
> current
> > /boot/loader that is scripted with FORTH to one that's scripted with Lua.
> > It will install the lua scripts in /boot/lua. The boot is scripted with
> > /boot/lua/loader.lua instead of /boot/loader.rc. You are strongly advised
> > to create a backup copy of /boot/loader before testing (eg cp
> /boot/loader
> > /boot/loader_forth), since you'll need to boot that from boot2 if
> something
> > goes wrong. I've tested it extensively, though, with userboot.so and it's
> > test program, so all the initial kinks of finding the lua scripts, etc
> have
> > been worked out.
> >
> > While it's possible to build all the /boot/loader variants with Lua, I've
> > just tested a BIOS booting /boot/loader both with and without menus
> > enabled. I've not tested any of the other variants and the instructions
> for
> > testing some of them may be rather tedious (especially UEFI, if you want
> a
> > simple path to back out). Since there's not been full convergence
> testing,
> > you'll almost certainly find bumps in this system. Also, all the
> > build-system APIs are likely not yet final.
> >
> > I put  MFC after a month on the commit. Due to the heroic (dare I say
> > almost crazy) work of Kyle Evans on merging all the revs from -current to
> > 11, I'm planning a MFC to 11 after the co-existence issues are hammered
> > out. In 11, FORTH will be the default, and Lua will  be built by default,
> > but users will have to do something to use it. 12, both FORTH and Lua
> will
> > be built and installed, with Lua as default (barring unforeseen
> > complications). Once the co-existence stuff goes in, I imagine we'll make
> > the switch to Lua by default shortly after that. In 13, FORTH will be
> > removed unless there's a really really compelling case made to keep it.
> >
> > So please give it a spin and give me any feedback, documentation updates
> > and/or bug fixes. I'm especially interested in reviews from people that
> > have embedded Lua in other projects or experts in Lua that can improve
> the
> > robustness of the menu code.
> >
> > Warner
> > _______________________________________________
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>
> Warner & Co,
>
> Great job all! Been wanting this for years, very excited to see it start
> landing :)
>
> One question, if we switch to Lua loader in TrueOS, do you know if the
> ZFS boot-environment menus have been implemented / tested yet?


I don't think that they have been implemented yet. I've certainly not
tested them.

Warner