On Tue, Mar 19, 2002 at 02:27:47AM +0000, Tony Finch wrote: > 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: I think the multiboot standard is flexible enough. If it isn't, we should change it IMHO. :) > (1) passing boot flags for things like single-user mode, etc. This is supported. > (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.) This is also possible. > (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? It doesn't matter what GRUB includes, the thing which matters if the FreeBSD bootloader and kernel can be modified to use the multiboot specification. I think that's possible. Miltiboot does support passing modules. The actual linkage (like symbol lookups etc) should be done in the kernel, because this is kernel-dependent. But I think this is already the case, isn't it? (Sorry, no time to find it out) Jeroen Dekkers -- Jabber supporter - http://www.jabber.org Jabber ID: jdekkers@jabber.org Debian GNU supporter - http://www.debian.org http://www.gnu.org IRC: jeroen@openprojects
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