> > IIRC, Linux kexec can boot other OSes in principle, so we should be able
> > to make this work for anything Linux can read the filesystem of.
>
> Which is a pretty serious restriction.
From the grub info page, supported filesystems are:
"BSD FFS", "DOS FAT16 and FAT32", "Minix fs", "Linux ext2fs", "ReiserFS",
"JFS", "XFS", and "VSTa fs"
Of these, Linux supports: Minix, FAT*, Minix, Reiser, JFS, XFS I understand
that the Linux UFS driver can support a number of filesystems, including
BSD's FFS. I think there's some support for Solaris' UFS in there also. The
UFS driver had experimental write support last time I checked, but all that's
really needed is basic read support to scrape the kernel off the disk.
There's also a Summer of Code project to make ZFS available as a FUSE
filesystem, which grub can't support (at the moment...). But until Solaris
uses ZFS as a root fs this probably doesn't matter so much.
> I'm still not clear on why this
> is a preferable approach to modifying grub?
It's not necessarily a replacement for grub, but I think it'd be good to
consider as an interim measure or as an alternative (there are already
patches for kexec-under Xen floating around, so all we'd need to do in
principle is to compile a kboot_sl ramdisk and run with it).
After all, it's not like there's a working grub port (that I know of) at the
moment, so it's not like we lose anything ;-)
Is there anything I've missed in grub that's really not supported well enough
to be done in Linux?
Cheers,
Mark
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