[syslinux] LVM support

[Ferenc Wagner]

"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa at zytor.com> writes:

> Ferenc Wagner wrote:
> 
>> Hearing the discussion about whether LILO should stay in Debian, I
>> started to wonder whether adding LVM support to EXTLINUX was
>> possible.  That's the main selling point of LILO, as far as I know.
>> And GRUB2 already has a module for parsing LVM metadata:
>> http://svn.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/trunk/grub2/disk/lvm.c?root=grub&view=log
>> 
>> Couldn't we somehow incorporate it?
>
> Should be doable once the filesystem code has moved to C.

Maybe a stupid question: if the boot LV is a single linear map,
wouldn't booting from that be very easy?  At the end of the day that
isn't different from it being a partition, after all.  The installer
could recognize this and patch in the sector numbers all the same.  If
the start of the filesystem was also patched in (I don't know this
offhand), then the filesystem code would have no problem reading the rest.

These two questions (LVM and Mini-OS) are related: I need to boot PV
Xen domains from LVM.  The first part is possible with Grub, the
second part is possible with Grub2, but I need both, so some hacking
is unavoidable.  And I'm familiar with Syslinux only.  So I bring up
this stuff here, as it may influence the bigger picture: the needed
improvements in the build system and the code reorganization, to make
it feasible at all (if it is received somewhat positively).

I'm willing to put real work into this (not much before autumn) but
preferably in a way that actually leads somewhere.  So expert advice
and insight is much needed.  And coordination with the SoC projects.
Moving the filesystem code to C is one of them, right?  Will anybody
work on this during the summer?
-- 
Cheers,
Feri.