GRUB's failed potential [LWN.net]

GRUB's failed potential

Posted Jan 23, 2008 3:22 UTC (Wed) by PO8 (guest, #41661)
In reply to: GRUB's failed potential by Junior_Samples
Parent article: LILO and GRUB: Boot Loaders Made Simple (O'ReillyNet)

The reason it's called the "GRand Universal Bootloader" is that it follows the multiboot spec,
which means that operating systems that honor that specification should be directly bootable
without any GRUB magic.  Arguably, if your operating system won't boot directly from GRUB,
it's a defect in your OS (or an outright bug in GRUB's multiboot support, I suppose :-).

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GRUB's failed potential

Posted Jan 23, 2008 3:40 UTC (Wed) by Junior_Samples (guest, #26737) [Link]

Thanks for the info. I suppose FreeBSD and NetBSD are defective since they can't be booted directly. Too bad for them. Correcting boot problems are probably a low priority on their "fix-it" list.

GRUB's failed potential

Posted Jan 23, 2008 16:21 UTC (Wed) by mheily (subscriber, #27123) [Link]

Multiboot is a GNU invention, not a standard, so one can hardly consider the BSD's to be
"defective" in this case. Is the Linux kernel "defective" because it doesn't implement
kqueue(4) from FreeBSD, or support ZFS from Sun?

Using the 'chainloader' function of GRUB to invoke a BSD bootloader works fine for the vast
majority of people. I use this setup on my desktop machine, in fact. It seems to me that
Multiboot is a solution in search of a problem.

GRUB's failed potential

Posted Jan 23, 2008 10:58 UTC (Wed) by etienne_lorrain@yahoo.fr (subscriber, #38022) [Link]

 Multiboot spec is crap in the fact that you could not boot an OS on a PC without a minimum
information from the BIOS, and you have none at all with that way to boot. It is not even
simple to return to real mode from a multiboot kernel because the loading of the operating
system may have overwritten important memory.
 I myself use Gujin to load kernels for the last few years, but I am biased
(http://gujin.org).
 I still like its behaviour (i.e. autoconfiguration) when using multiple distributions (kernel
up/downgrades) and removeable hardware (changing hard disks, USB keys containing complete
distributions, boot from DVDs or images of DVD in a partitions, boot from DOS)...
 The main problem of Grub is which grub.conf will be used if you have 4 distributions, each of
them using Grub, and have booted from a USB key.

Etienne.