[SLOF] [PATCH] Fix ugly boot menu if devices have been specified with bootindex

[Thomas Huth]

On 25.04.2017 16:04, Alexey Kardashevskiy wrote:
> On 25/04/17 01:40, Thomas Huth wrote:
>> On 11.04.2017 09:18, Alexey Kardashevskiy wrote:
>> [...]
>>> In order to fix the initial bugreport, may be it could make sense to
>>> create aliases such as "bootindexN" for all devices with a valid bootindex
>>> property... Although I am not sure it is worth the effort and there will be
>>> users for it, ever.
>>
>> bootindex aliases also sound quite ugly to me, and this way we still
>> display devices twice, one time the "bootindex" version and one time the
>> version that SLOF auto-detected during boot.
>>
>> Assuming that we still want to fix the boot menu somehow, I think we
>> should rather ignore the $bootdev list here and simply show all devices
>> instead that SLOF detected during boot, i.e. walk the cdromX, diskX and
>> netX aliases here instead. Does that also sound OK to you?
> 
> What you propose may look nicer but the current situation lets me
> distinguish at least some items in the boot menu (the long ones, with
> bootindex), if the entire menu is all made of aliases - this I won't use at
> all :) Is it just me and others find aliases useful even when a driver name
> is not a part of an alias?

I did not mean to remove the full device tree strings in the output
there. I'd keep the current way of printing both, the alias and the full
device tree path. I just meant to change the way that the menu code
gathers the list of devices that should be printed there. Currently it
uses all devices from $bootdev - which is just bollocks as soon as the
user specifies one of the devices with "bootindex" or changed the
boot-device NVRAM variable.

So let me summarize again: The boot menu should simply print *all*
discovered devices, not only the ones from $bootdev. The simplest way to
get a list of all discovered boot devices is to walk the cdromX, diskX
and netX aliases (since we do not support FCODE or other devices, there
should be no other format of aliases as far as I can see).
This list should then be presented with "<nr>. <alias>: <path>" output
lines to the users, so they have the full choice of all boot devices.

Hope that helps to clarify my ideas ... Does that now sound OK to you?

 Thomas