Re: gnu-20011016.tar.gz available
On Wed, Oct 17, 2001 at 12:03:44PM +0100, Paul Emsley wrote:
>
> I'd be happy if someone could explain to ignorant me what
> serverboot did and why getting rid of it is a good thing.
I don't have the time to go into the details (it was discussed on
bug-hurd@gnu.org), but basically, serverboot was the program which was
booted on Mach, and it was responsible to boot the whole Hurd system.
In the Hurd, you need to start with two programs, the bootstrap filesystem
(ext2fs) and exec. Both are sufficient to load and start the third server
etc, until the boot completed. This is what serverboot did. serverboot was
needed as the single-module boot supported by Mach was not sufficient to
boot the Hurd directly.
serverboot could read files directly from the disk partitions with various
file system formats like minix, ufs, ext2fs, fat, and then start them. So,
it was a stripped down file system parser and a stripped down exec. It
duplicated functionality that was already in GRUB and other Hurd servers.
Roland put the code to support multiple modules in Mach, and now we can let
GRUB do the loading of the files (it already supports many filesystems, and
network storage!), and we can let Mach do the conversion of files to tasks.
So, the functionality is nicely split up in places where it fits better.
The Hurd is booted directly, and there is no middle man who is restricting
us from doing more clever stuff, like booting the Hurd from the net etc.
I hope this clears it up a bit,
Marcus
--
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de
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