Re: Booting a modular kernel through a multiple streams file

Eric W. Biederman
2001-12-23T06:28:30Z

Dave Cinege <dcinege@psychosis.com> writes:

> On Sunday 16 December 2001 15:37, Otto Wyss wrote:
>
> > modules) are combined into a single file. The boot loader (i.e. lilo)
>
> LILO follows an outdated, broken concept and should once and for all
> be layed to rest, preferably with a stake through it's heart.

The way LILO does things is perfectly valid. Not flexible, not dynamic
but valid.

> > simply loads this file and starts the first stream (the kernel).
>
> The point to all these 'streams' escapes me. The proper way to implement
> this has all ready been done. It's called the Multi Boot Standard
> as implemented in GRUB bootloader. http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/

GRUB is a good proof of concept bootloader but I wouldn't call it
a good way to implement things. As for the Multi Boot Specification
it is hardly a standard, and it got a lot of details wrong. A big
one is who is supposed to do the BIOS calls.

It should be o.k. for a bootloader to be static, but still useful on multiple
machines for years. What comes out of GRUB does not encourage a
static bootloader. But the development of GRUB is slow enough that it
is practically static...

> GRUB is similar to syslinux in that is can read directly from the the FS,
> but unlike syslinux supports just about all of them instead of just FAT.
>
> Basically what Grub does is loads the kernel modules from disk
> into memory, and 'tells' the kernel the memory location to load
> them from, very similar to how an initrd file is loaded. The problem
> is Linux, is not MBS compilant and doesn't know to look for and load
> the modules.

So tell me how you make an MBS compliant alpha kernel again?

Eric