Re: booting another system from running linux (kexec)

[Marco Gerards <metgerards@student.han.nl>]

"Gerd v. Egidy" <lists@egidy.de> writes:

> On Thursday 23 September 2004 21:30, Tomas Ebenlendr wrote:
>> > Another way to solve this would be to add scripting, dhcp, rsync and
>> > writing to linux-fs/ntfs directly into grub. But I think that is a huge
>> > task and not flexible enough.
>>
>> That is what is grub2 supposed, It will have modules. Anyone can write
>> his own modules, and have grub2 installed from his distro. (If we will
>> not believe that, we will probably not choose to implement grub2, at
>> least in this way....). But grub2 is not stable (nor beta) yet. I don't
>> know if current state can be considered as alpha (probably yes).
>
> Ok, but I'll have to re-implement everything as grub module. Except if busybox 
> would be included into grub by default...

GRUB is not an operating system... :)

> I'm just wondering if it is not a very ambitious goal to develop nic drivers 
> for all cards supported under linux. And I think that is duplicating a lot of 
> work. 

GRUB Legacy has network drivers already.

> So wouldn't it be better concept to boot a _very stripped down_ version of 
> linux, let the scripting and stuff be done by the already existing busybox 
> framework and use kexec to do the real boot into the final os? This would 
> turn big parts of grub into regular linux userspace code.

Can kexec boot GNU/Hurd, *BSD or function as a chainloader?  Booting
into linux takes a lot of time and this is not practical because you
will have to boot something anyway.

--
Marco