Subject: bug#27007: [PATCH 1/2] bootloader: Use menu-entry to define custom bootloader entries.

From: Mathieu Othacehe <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Jun 2017 11:29:38 +0200

Hi !

> People apparently start other Linux distributions with it :)

Yes because they use initrd only to mount root partition, then kernel is
starting /sbin/init provided by systemd or other init mechanism.

For people who's custom kernel is able to access root partition without
loading any module, maybe we could provide a kernel argument init=<path
of the boot script launching shepherd>.

Before GuixSD I didn't use an initrd to boot fastly. On GuixSD, because
shepherd start is quite slow (unparallelized ?) compared to systemd, the
few ms spent in initrd execution seems unsignificant.

But maybe there are other advantages not to run an initrd.

> How's the error reporting?  If a user still has boot-parameters in his bootloader configuration menu-entries, will "guix system reconfigure" fail *before* he reboots?  If so, does the error message hint on how to fix it?

Yes it will fail, some users have sadly already experimented this error.

> LGTM as is.  The user interface is now the same as it had been before (in 0.13.0) - so it's an improvement.
>
> I just checked:  The 0.13.0 release is safe.  Phiew.

Ok, let's wait for Ludo's approval then :)

Thanks for reviewing Danny,

Mathieu