RFC: https://community.theforeman.org/t/rfc-configurable-list-of-pxe-loaders-for-host-provisioning/43680

SPIKE investigation

Current state

The available options for operating systems are hardcoded and defined for each OS family. The bootloader options available to OSs are also hardcoded.

Proposals

Provide a feature for configuring bootloader options. There are three ideas:

• In the settings
• Per OS
• By Subnet
• Host params

Settings

Add a new setting (array) which will override bootloader options for all operating systems.
Pros

• Simple to implement & test
• A quick way to remove bootloaders that are not used anywhere in the organization(s)

Cons

• One setting to rule them all, not very flexible.

OS association

Introduce a new association where every operating system will have a list of available (allowed) bootloaders, and users can choose which one they want to associate (enable) for the specific operating system.

The available bootloaders can still be defined in the code, allowing us to ensure that users can't associate bootloaders that are incompatible with the selected OS.

Pros

• Flexible
• Similar features are everywhere across Foreman

Cons

• More code & migrations needed.
• Will require more testing

Subnet

The idea is to filter bootloaders on the subnet. This idea came from the RFC. A Swedish university would likely have a use case for it, but I'm unsure how many other users/customers have provisioning capabilities split across subnets.
Additionally, I'm not aware of any similar existing filtering on the subnet level; it doesn't fit well into the Foreman ecosystem.

Host params

As usual, host params can be used, but I don't see any benefits over the OS association example.