Re: Some Hurd and Mach programming questions
> What I'm wondering about is why Hurd doesn't let GRUB just load
> multiple modules but uses one not-very-elegant module (serverboot)
> instead. Didn't GRUB has the support to load multiple modules when
> Hurd was born?
GRUB does indeed, and always has (it supports the multiboot spec, after
all). There is no good reason for the current scheme except that it most
closely matces the pre-multiboot scheme and so was the least work at the
time. My original notion when we were hashing out multiboot was that GRUB
would read a script like /boot/servers.boot and load all the files into
memory, using the full lines with the $ magic as the "boot module string"
instead of just the file name. Then the kernel would grok the boot script
magic and set up the initial tasks, rather than serverboot doing this.
(Shantanu's boot_script.[ch] were written with this sort of in-kernel use
supposedly in mind.) Some months back I started a bit of the hacking to
make things happen this way, but the only thing I really got done was
making mach-defpager usable by itself (started from rc) rather than having
it rolled into serverboot. I don't think there was anthing hairy about the
rest of the work that needs to be done, I just never got around to it.
I vaguely recall the boot_script.c code needs some reworking for the way
you'd like to do things to use it inside Mach.
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