Re: LUA boot loader coming very soon

On Mon, Feb 12, 2018 at 9:45 AM, Kris Moore <kris_at_ixsystems.com> wrote:

> On 02/12/2018 11:31, Warner Losh wrote:
>
>
>
> 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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>> > https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current
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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
>
> Ok, I'll have to mess about with it. I recall there was some library which
> created to expose ZFS in limited functionality over to the FORTH code.
> That's probably a good place to start and see if that still works and Lua
> can probe the pool for BE information.
>

OK. There's no such functionality in FORTH in the tree today. However, zfs
sets a number of env vars that loader.getenv() can get in lua.

Warner