Re: Booting a modular kernel through a multiple streams file

Erik Mouw
2001-12-19T14:14:08Z

On Tue, Dec 18, 2001 at 11:50:47AM -0800, Grover, Andrew wrote:
> > From: Alexander Viro [mailto:viro@math.psu.edu]
> > On Tue, 18 Dec 2001, Grover, Andrew wrote:
> > > GRUB 0.90 does this today.
> > ... and I'm quite sure that EMACS could do it easily. Let's not talk
> > about GNU bloatware, OK?
>
> I don't think this is bloatware, especially considering there really isn't
> any cost for having a full-featured bootloader - all its footprint gets
> reclaimed, after all. I respect lilo and its cousins, but they make things
> harder than they have to be. Why maintain a reduced level of functionality
> (software emaciation?) when better alternatives are available?

I think it's time to wake you up from your warm and fuzzy "all the
world is an x86" dream.

Al's initramfs works on *all* architectures, not only on an
architecture which happens to have a bootloader bloated enough to be an
operating system in itself.

Let me disturb you even further: you might think that a full featured
bootloader/firmware is a Good Thing, but in the ARM Linux world we have
learned that a simple bootloader is *much* better for maintainability.
I think the ACPI problems exactly show my point: depending on BIOS
vendors to get the ACPI tables right just doesn't work.

Erik

--
J.A.K. (Erik) Mouw, Information and Communication Theory Group, Faculty
of Information Technology and Systems, Delft University of Technology,
PO BOX 5031, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands Phone: +31-15-2783635
Fax: +31-15-2781843 Email: J.A.K.Mouw@its.tudelft.nl
WWW: http://www-ict.its.tudelft.nl/~erik/