Date: Fri, 4 Dec 1998 18:42:05 +0100 From: "Karsten W. Rohrbach" <rohrbach@nacamar.net> To: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: idea: GRUB as standard boot loader Message-ID: <19981204184205.A19848@nacamar.net>
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hi folks, fiddling around with many free os'es i finally got my hands on GRUB (grand unified bootloader) due to the special stuff one's gotta do when booting mach or other microkernels... i had my box running freebsd2.2.x-stable, linux, hurd, lites based linux-i386 server and fiasco (well dos/winnt is also on one partition). the funny thing with grub is, that it is fully runtime configured (eg. it reads a file off some partition and interprets it as a menu) and you can drop to a command line and boot up the system with custom parameters such as root partition or (in mach case) the servers you gotta start fully interactive. since the loader supports filesystems like fat, ufs and ext2fs you can have the menu file and stage2 loader on nearly any disk/partition in the system. it has native support for loading and booting bsd style kernels (freebsd2.x, netbsd, 386bsd), mach style stuff (lites, osf's mklinux stuff, fiasco), linux vmlinux and zImage (piggyback) kernels. it also starts standard msdos style chainloaded bootblock thingamabobs. now whats missing is the root device detection for freebsd3 (it seems that something has changed). when i upgraded to freebsd-3.0-release, grub did not pass the correct root device to the kernel (so i installed a standard bootloader on freebsd's main partition and boot it via the chainloader). i tried to get "booteasy" to work several times on several (scsi) systems and booteasy often seems to screw with disk geometry issues, so the boxes refuse to start. the 100% fix was to install grub or to install the standard freebsd bootloader. the main thing with grub is versatility, and it would be kinda cool thing to have grub as standard freebsd bootloader (hey it kicks ass). the only issue for a fix would be the root device detection, i dont have a clue where to look for that, but when i got my -current box running again, i might look into that... just my idea for a more flexible boot solution... /k -- "Nuclear war can ruin your whole compile." -- Karl Lehenbauer http://www.nacamar.de - http://www.nacamar.net - http://www.webmonster.de http://www.apache.de - http://www.quakeforum.de - finger rohrbach@nacamar.net PGP Key fingerprint = F9 A0 DF 91 74 07 6A 1C 5F 0B E0 6B 4D CD 8C 44 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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