[openbeos] Re: Stage 1 Bootloader
- From: Eike Dehling <e.e.dehling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2002 00:55:42 +0100
Uh. I just don't understand why some people support GRUB as if it was the
Holy Grail made into bytes. GRUB depends on the BIOS. GRUB must be
compiled with support for a given filesystem. GRUB and LILO are both stupid.
There is absolutely no need to compie grub for ONE filesystem. i don't know
where you got that idea from. You compile grub, and then you install it
with support for whatever filesystem you want. (the
one-filesystem-module-restriction is ONLY for loading the 'real' grub
program ... and then the 'real' grub supports all filesystems you want it
to) Besides grub can load from blocklists. or chainload 'your' bootsector.
BTW: I'm not saying grub is perfect, i'm not saying it's the holy grail. If
you show something better, thats my favorite till i find something better
:) but grub does a lot more than most loaders. And you should agree that
having something like the multiboot standard bootup procedure will make
loading easier, than implementing 1000 proprietary parameter passing and
bootup 'protocols' for a loader which loads several operating systems.
(chainloading and the like aren't the cleanest approaches to me ...)
it's small enough to provide us the required documentation to access the
hard drive, in real mode, without depending on the BIOS.
Is accessing the harddrive without bios then all you have to complain about
grub? thats about 100 lines of assembly. and: why does a computer have a
BIOS? it's there to make the programmers life easier. not to make it harder
by avoiding the premade code. It is probably slower than doing it yourself.
but it's a bootloader! speed is in my opinion not the ultimate goal there.
A question: grub uses LBA acces for disks that support it. Is that still
via the BIOS?
Keep smiling. It just a discussion, not a fight ;)
Eike.
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