I just talked to Brett Johnson, the maintainer for elilo. My suggestion of having initrd= and module= be synonyms doesn't work well with the elilo parser. However, he prefers a solution that AFAIK has not yet been proposed:

- Leave image= for the Linux kernel image. - Leave initrd= for the Linux kernel's initrd - Add a NEW keyword, xenimage=, to specify the xen binary.

He says that the module= proposal is already Xen-specific; he doesn't see any other uses for it on the horizon. The term "module" is also very vague and doesn't describe what it is being used for. So, he says, why not just be explicit that we are booting Xen and leave the image= and initrd= keywords with the same Linux meaning. Thus:

label=xen xenimage=xen image=xenlinux initrd=initrd.img

(and if we don't want to explicitly encode the term "Xen" in the keyword, we could use "hvimage=" or "hv=" or "hypervisor="** instead.)

Brett's solution seems the best to me. It will also work quite nicely for a transparently paravirtualized system: If xenimage= is specified but the file is not found, just load and boot image= which will boot normal Linux.

Comments?

On a related note: Anthony, Brett said that he would much prefer to see a patch against elilo v3.5-pre1 as there are additional bug fixes in that base.

Dan

** probably don't want to use "hypervisor=" since the word has been trademarked by a certain big blue company :-)