Booting a gazillion linuxes?

Richard W.M. Jones rjones at redhat.com
Wed Mar 4 21:24:45 UTC 2009


On Tue, Mar 03, 2009 at 09:46:30PM -0500, Tom Horsley wrote:
> Any recommendations for the best way to organize a big
> old disk chock full of different versions of linux so I
> can boot different ones?
> 
> For just a few linux versions, I've used a stand alone
> grub and chainloaded different partitions which, in turn,
> have their own grub.
> 
> With enough different linux versions installed, I'll have to
> use LVMs instead of extended partitions, and it occurs to me
> that I have no idea if grub can be pointed at an LVM to
> chainload the linux there (I certainly don't see anything in
> the grub info file that mentions lvm or any syntax that
> might be used to reference one).

I do this - perhaps not gazillions, but 5 or 6 different versions of
Linux + a Windows partition.

  /dev/sda1  Windows
  /dev/sda2  Shared Linux /boot
  /dev/sda3  Shared Linux swap
  /dev/sda4  Linux PV containing all Linux root fs's

I use LVM for the Linux rootfs's, and I just have grub boot them
directly.

Is there a reason you want to chainload them (except for Windows of
course)?

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-df lists disk usage of guests without needing to install any
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http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-df/




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