GRUB understanding more file storage systems

Posted Jun 18, 2004 22:50 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: LILO vs. GRUB by thoffman
Parent article: LILO vs. GRUB

Of course, the best solution would be to teach GRUB to understand: ...

Oh Lord, no. We don't want two parallel sets of software for all these things. And if you make Grub that complex, it will be large enough, buggy enough, and volatile enough, that you'll want a boot loader for Grub.

The Linux kernel itself used to be the "boot loader" (you'd put the kernel image on the disk, starting at sector 0). There's a reason we added a tiny boot loader stage to the mix.

It seems to me we need to separate the storage for the boot information (including the boot images) from the storage for all the files we use after a full system is running. The running system is too complex for the boot loader to keep up with it. But the boot loader's filesystem requirements are extremely simple.

So neither Grub nor LILO have it figured out.