Arch Linux

Klenje

Member

From: Europe

Registered: 2007-09-12

Posts: 36

GRUB2 and beyond

Hi, well, Grub works fine, but it feels a bit old and limited... I don't know why, but I think that it should be possible to go beyond it. I've seen that a new Grub is in development, but I didn't find a status page or something, just people saying is very alpha... anyone knows what's the status? Is there anyone using it or an alternative boot manager? Of course lilo doesn't count

gothmog.todi

Member

From: Austria

Registered: 2007-07-18

Posts: 120

Re: GRUB2 and beyond

I absolutely understand what you mean.
I don't know about any other boot loaders, but the status page for grub2 can be found here: http://grub.enbug.org/CurrentStatus

AndyRTR

Developer

From: Magdeburg/Germany

Registered: 2005-10-07

Posts: 1,642

Re: GRUB2 and beyond

go on and maintain a pkg for grub(2) in AUR. they just had a new snapshot release.

right now it's no alternative and won't go into the official repos. it has to support all our architectures and possible filesystems first. but before that happens we might have a working and accepted linuxbios and grub2 may be obsolete.

andre.ramaciotti

Member

From: Brazil

Registered: 2007-04-06

Posts: 649

Re: GRUB2 and beyond

Hm.. What else a bootloader could/should do beyond, you know, booting?

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jb

Member

From: Florida

Registered: 2006-06-22

Posts: 466

Re: GRUB2 and beyond

I absolutely understand what you mean.
I don't know about any other boot loaders, but the status page for grub2 can be found here: http://grub.enbug.org/CurrentStatus

Either they haven't accomplished anything in the last couple of years, or that page has been forgotten.

GrubWiki: CurrentStatus (last edited 2006-04-02 09:04:17 by YoshinoriOkuji)

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Klenje

Member

From: Europe

Registered: 2007-09-12

Posts: 36

Re: GRUB2 and beyond

go on and maintain a pkg for grub(2) in AUR. they just had a new snapshot release.

right now it's no alternative and won't go into the official repos. it has to support all our architectures and possible filesystems first. but before that happens we might have a working and accepted linuxbios and grub2 may be obsolete.

I had a look at linuxbios (now called coreboot, it seems) and it seems promising, although the problem here is that this needs HW support from the motherboard producer, and I don't think that this could happen before a couple of years. also from what I read on wikipedia, coreboot could pass the control to grub and then grub would boot the OS, but I don't see the point in doing that, if coreboot can directly boot the OS. For sure, actual BIOS has a lot of things for backward compatibility that makes no sense nowadays.
I had already seen Grub2 status page, but apart from not being updated for a while, the entire thing seems quite messy and unstable, starting from the website, and besides, I don't have a testing machine for it...

Hm.. What else a bootloader could/should do beyond, you know, booting?

well, of course grub does its work and it does fine. But I'd say that in 2008 you could hope for more advanced features, such as internazionalization or better graphics. I know that this brings in other possible issues, but for some users this could be very useful