Author Topic: GUI for changing boot options (with profiles)  (Read 5999 times)

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ianmac77

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GUI for changing boot options (with profiles)
« on: January 16, 2012, 09:13:15 PM »
In the process of debugging, it would be nice to have the ability to control what kexts load and org.chameleon.boot.plist options from a GUI. Sometimes it can be very hard to figure out what kext or option makes your system crash. And if a crashing kext is in /S/L/E you are required to boot to an OS to move the files around. Sometimes this isn't an option, and when it is, it's not very efficient.

My idea is to have a GUI interface at the Chameleon bootloader, that looks much like ?memory or the help page. From this interface you could have saved profiles on the left, with the ability to add a new one. On the right are all the options for org.chameleon.boot.plist (Arch, EthernetBuiltIn, etc...). There would also be a button that takes you to a page where you can enable / disable individual kexts, including any non-Apple kexts in /S/L/E.

Sometimes it's hard to see which /Extra folder you are using. It could be /E on the EFI partition, /E on the selected boot partition, or /E on a flash drive. So ideally you would be able to choose to load or disable /E/E (flash drive with chameleon) and /E/E (hard drive), load DSDT from /E/DSDT.aml on flash, or DSDT from /E/DSDT.aml on the hard drive. The idea here is to choose which Extra folder to use (flash drive or partition chosen).

My hope is that people would be able to easily change these options from the boot loader instead of booting to an OS or changing files on the bootable flash drive. Because this solution clearly shows you what is being loaded, and with what options, it should also clear up some of the confusion inherent in testing options / kexts.

PS: This is an idea for Chameleon 2.1svn