Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2002 10:31:59 +0100 From: Michel TALON <talon@lpthe.jussieu.fr> To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: GNU GRUB folks need BSD hackers Message-ID: <20020111103159.A46044@lpthe.jussieu.fr>
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Kris Kennaway on 2002-01-10 (Thu) at 12:13:47 -0800: > > On Thu, Jan 10, 2002 at 12:48:40PM +0200, Johann Visagie wrote: > > Just noticed this, FWIW: > > > > http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/#bsd > > > > "We really need help by BSD hackers. Currently, almost nobody works for > > BSD-based operating systems, such as FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. So > > we have critical problems in booting later versions of NetBSD and > > OpenBSD. FreeBSD is not a big problem, because GRUB can boot it via > > /boot/loader for now." > > Well, that's how you're _supposed_ to boot FreeBSD. >Puzzled me as well. The point is that grub is able to boot FreeBSD by booting /boot/loader first, but is not able to boot directly the OpenBSD kernel (and presumably the NetBSD kernel) while it was able to do it some months ago. Now you have to use chainloader, that is boot the boot blocks of the OpenBSD partition that in turn boot the kernel. Since grub is a VERY convenient booting tool, particularly for rescue situations, this is inconvenient. Hence it is particularly reasonable for grub people to ask help to understand why grub does not work now for *BSD and solve the problem. As for the multiboot specification, this is a grub people concept that no existing OS respects (even Linux) except HURD. They explain it in an info document. Nevertheless grub is a very nice program, which understands many filesystems (in particular the Linux, *BSD filesystems) is able to analyse and boot a lot of OS, and is very easy to use. It is in particular much more convenient than the more standard Lilo program and is clearly much inspired by the BSD booting programs. Obviously /boot/loader has much in common with it, but as far as i have tried some features of /boot/loader don't seem to work correctly, for example trying to retreive kernels from non UFS partitions - correct me if i am wrong (in principle it should work, from what i read in man libstand) while with grub i can effectively load things in any supported filesystem. -- Michel TALON To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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