Re: Booting a modular kernel through a multiple streams file

Dave Cinege
2001-12-23T17:59:22Z

On Sunday 23 December 2001 8:48, Alan Cox wrote:
>
> And vendors who've shipped GRUB still have to ship Lilo because Grub plain
> doesn't work on some machines.

This is an issue with how GRUB deals with a FUBAR BIOS, and not
necessarily a core GRUB design flaw.

Syslinux, seems to win hands down (IMO) when it comes to dealing with
flacky BIOS's, but it's not because it's a dynamic loading design; it's
because HPA knew enough and spent the time refining that 1% of the
program that deals with bad BIOSes.

Should HPA and Werner take a day of their time to review and
correct GRUB, I'm sure this issue would vanish overnight.

> Lilo has the virtue that its extremely
> simple in what it does and how it does it. It works in a suprisingly large
> number of cases and can handle interesting setups that GRUB really
> struggles with.

Where GRUB struggles LILO throws up brickwalls.

Coolest thing is the world you can do with grub:
Load a *partition* as your initrd
With this in mind it makes using images/archives for initrd for
non-embedded systems seem rather clunky. It's much cleaner
to just have an 8/16/32MB partition you dedicate to initrd. Users of
GRUB have been able to do this for YEARS.

And something to say here: Yes I hate lilo, but not because I think
Werner coded it lousy. A boot loader that uses a static block offset
to find it's target is a bad idea, that should have died with M$-DOS.

That said, it's still a wonder to me why GRUB, or another loader similar
in approach, was not adopted as the 'prefered' linux loader years ago.

Dave

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