Discuss the "compatible" protocol with existing projects (bootloader, OSes)

[mmuman]

Please, I understand you want to come up with something cleaner, and I'd welcome that as well rather than having to parse Linux kernel args in Haiku to support a feature that existed 20 years ago in BeOS (BeOS R5 Personal Edition supported booting from a BFS 'IMAGE.BE' inside a FAT at that time), but I'd rather not do it 5 times, so please consult other projects to come up with a common protocol.

It will certainly take more time, but will have higher chances of being picked up, including by competitors. The existing project seems not too bad although a bit convoluted and project-specific.

I'm specifically thinking about:

• MultibootUSB,

• GRUB (they have an IRC channel on Freenode) which already have an extensive MultiBoot spec (actually two, there's a v2 as well) where the loopback info can likely be piggybacked,

• Coreboot,

• U-Boot, although not much used on x86 but there's no reason loopback booting should be restricted to x86 (although Raspberry Pi actually their own stuff and ARM64 use EFI, but there are still older hw around),

• Haiku, ReactOS, all of the BSDs because there's not only GNU/Linux in life…

• QEMU (have a look at QEMU-img & QEMU-nbd) and NBDkit which might have some ideas to extend the concept to networked images…