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Bootloader FAQ: Difference between revisions
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(→What should my bootloader support?: Make slightly less biased by saying they could be features. Also include a remark on the impossibility of a long mode higher-half kernel without paging) |
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The last time you installed a Linux distro, chances are you wrote the live CD to the USB drive and booted from it. The problem, however, is that BIOSes treat USB drives as hard disks, so the CD image needs to additionally contain a valid MBR that is then loaded by the BIOS. Now, in contrast to hard drives, the space available between the MBR and the first interesting ISO-9660 sector may be used for stage-2.
=== Network ===
A Network bootloader can load your kernel straight from the machine which compiled it. Many (all?) network chipsets and BIOSes made in the last 15 or so years support the PXE standard for network boot. You will need a tftp (Trivial FTP) server to serve your kernel and stage-2 bootloader, and may need to specially configure a suitable DHCP server.
== What should my bootloader support? ==
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It's probably a good idea to start from the bare minimum in order to load the kernel, then implement whatever you see the kernel needs. Don't try to match an existing specification (e.g. Multiboot), otherwise it would be probably better to use an existing bootloader (e.g. GRUB).
[[Category:Bootloaders]]
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