Re: Can GRUB Boot Haiku?

[Simon Hobson]

Andrei Borzenkov <address@hidden> wrote:

> It /may/ be possible to avoid knowledge of filesystem - after all, 440
> bytes cannot realistically implement it too, so boot block likely reads
> from some standard offset. So grub could read boot block, extract
> location of whatever it needs, load and jump to it. As poof of concept
> such location could be passed in as argument.

CF the way LILO did it. When installing LILO, AIUI the program running under 
the full OS with all it's resources would find the relevant files and generate 
a list of blocks. The initial bootloader would then read a (small) list of 
blocks into memory which contains the next stage of the loader, and so on. I 
think the second stage also had a list of blocks for the kernel - but I was 
never an expert and it was a long time ago.
I d know that when doing various things that could change a file in /boot, you 
had to re-run the setup program or the system would be unbootable.