Subject: Re: what is the best multiboot tool
To: Juan RP <juan@xtrarom.org>
From: Daniel Carosone <dan@geek.com.au>
List: port-i386
Date: 01/24/2006 17:48:55
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On Tue, Jan 24, 2006 at 07:26:27AM +0100, Juan RP wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Jan 2006 07:22:33 +0100
> IMHO, the best option actually is GRUB. The NetBSD bootloader (AFAIK)
> won't boot Linux (it can boot any other BSD or Windows).
It will, via chain-booting whatever bootloader you like for linux.
You're kind-of stuck with some kind of chain-booting either way.
Even if you use grub natively to boot NetBSD most of the time, you're
likely to still want to have a NetBSD bootloader in your root fs, and
a grub menu entry to chain-boot that, because grub can't pass all the
netbsd kernel boot options like our bootloader. And of course either
needs to chain-boot the windows loader.
All that said, I agree that grub is probably your first choice as the
first boot-loader. Using grub there will allow your multi-boot
machine to also be used with Xen; with suitable kernels you can run
either O/S native or both together under Xen. Be prepared to spend
some time cursing your way up the learning curve if you're not already
familiar with grub.
I recommend a small /boot fs for grub itself, and perhaps other
kernels. This fs should be ext2fs, alas: while grub will read bsd ffs
it doesn't follow symlinks when loading kernels from ffs, which means
editing the menu.lst file every time you upgrade the kernel.
--
Dan.
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