GRUB's failed potential [LWN.net]

GRUB's failed potential

Posted Jan 23, 2008 3:40 UTC (Wed) by Junior_Samples (guest, #26737)
In reply to: GRUB's failed potential by PO8
Parent article: LILO and GRUB: Boot Loaders Made Simple (O'ReillyNet)

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.

(Log in to post comments)

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.