Re: Rescue mode

[Nimrod Zimerman <zimerman@deskmail.com>]

On Sun, Mar 07, 1999 at 01:03:06PM -0500, Albert D. Cahalan wrote:

> The rest of his ideas would require a decent boot loader, which we
> don't have. We won't have a decent boot loader without the ability
> to write the code in C, and we might need more space at the beginning
> of an ext2 filesystem.

Assuming I understood the paragarph correctly, you are looking for a
boot-loader written (mostly) in C. Isn't lilo the same? I wouldn't know.
I've never seriously used it.

Grub is a good boot-loader, with some valued features that I really like.
Its greatest advantage is that it understands ext2 and fat filesystems (and
maybe some more), hence you can start, from your boot-loader, any kernel on
any accessible filesystem. This is especially useful when things
go the wrong way.

> Hey, that's another kernel issue: more space at the beginning of an
> ext2 filesystem. I'd say 96 kB would be good.

If this would be available too, Grub (which is far larger than lilo) would
make an even better boot-loader. Currently, it still requires a piece of it
to live in a constant place on some known media (a file on the Linux
partition would do) - if this constant place can be made even more constant,
things would be even better.

I think that Grub can be a very good replacement to lilo (given some
problems are fixed - one is that it doesn't understand the 'vga' boot
option. I added partial support for this in my copy, and passed it on to the
maintainer, but he hasn't released a more recent version yet).
People have problems with lilo nowdays because it is terribly delicate,
especially when dealt with by somebody who doesn't understand how it works.
Grub is better in that respect - after initial installation, its image
needn't be changed. Its configuration file is accessed directly from the
live filesystem. Configured correctly, one can simply load
'/usr/src/linux/arch/i386/zImage', which would (by default, say) load the
kernel most recently compiled, with no need to change anything anywhere.

All I wanted to say was that Grub is a nice boot-loader written largely
in C. I ended up praising Grub... but it deserves it. I hope it will be part
of the future of Linux. ;-)

It can be found at http://www.uruk.org/grub/.

                                                   Nimrod
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