Grub Manual

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Fri, 19 Oct 2007, Lamar Owen wrote:

> On Friday 19 October 2007, Les Mikesell wrote:
> > Those things aren't really related to grub, which is why they
> > aren't in the grub manual.  They are related to how a running
> > fedora system finds the place from a linux perspective to make
> > updates that grub will find on the next boot.  The reasons you
> > have to get that part right don't have anything to do with grub
> > itself, just conventions within fedora.
>
> Is there perhaps a Fedora Wiki page on the Fedora boot process and
> on how to fix or change things at this level?  Something that goes
> beyond the grub manuals, which are too general for adequate use
> under any distribution (I've played with this on F7 and ubuntu 7.04
> both, and they do things very differently; ubuntu, for instance,
> doesn't even have a grub.conf....)?
>
> Something that describes the full boot up to the point of logging in would be
> quite useful for troubleshooting why it broke.  Something that describes how
> grub passes the boot off to the kernel, how (and why) the kernel starts nash,
> what nash does, how nash does what it does, and how init gets control and
> starts running rc.sysinit, what that does, and how the various /etc/init.d
> scripts get called (Ubuntu does it differently; a Fedora-specific doc is
> needed). Something that describes the contents of initrd, how to change those
> contents (like you need to do when you need to change the driver for the root
> filesystem's controller, if the controller's driver is modular).
> A 'Fedora-Boot-HOWTO' if you will.

the problem with asking for a single document for all of that is that
the above represents multiple phases of the boot process.

you could first have a manual that explains grub in splendid detail,
but once you get to the kernel being loaded and invoked, the grub
manual is done -- its job is effectively over.

then there is all the work done by the kernel as it starts to run and
initializes your system (best understood, sadly, by reading the actual
source in init/main.c in the kernel source tree). and once the kernel
hands off control to "init", that's a whole new topic yet again.
it's unlikely that a single document is going to cover all that --
your best bet is to just collect the best tutorials you can find on
each phase, and tweak them so they mesh nicely.

rday
-- 
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Robert P. J. Day
Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry
Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

http://crashcourse.ca
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