Re: Booting

[Tony Finch <dot@dotat.at>]

In article <[🔎] 20020317182320.GA2898@celeron.dekkers> you write:
>
>Reading quickly the things supported, I think those things can be
>passed from the loader to the kernel using the multiboot
>specification. FreeBSD doesn't need to abandon its bootloader and the
>way of doing things, just change it to use the multiboot
>specification. That way you could use the FreeBSD loader for every
>kernel and every multiboot-compliant bootloader for the FreeBSD kernel.

You should be reading the man pages for the -CURRENT boot loader,
because it has changed significantly since 4.X. The loader is
responsible for:

(1) passing boot flags for things like single-user mode, etc.
(2) passing environment variables, such as boot-time tunables
    (size of static data structures in the kernel etc.) and
    unprobeable device information (mostly for non-PnP ISA).
    (The latter is new in -CURRENT.)
(3) pre-linking modules into the kernel; the kernel itself
    doesn't have to include all the drivers needed to boot
    on a machine.

Does GRUB include a linker?

Tony.