Isn't one of the use cases in GRUB choosing which kernel you want to load?
They address this use case in the video. Their loader can show a menu.
No more boot loader: Please use the kernel instead
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Re: No more boot loader: Please use the kernel instead
#22This reminds me of MILO for booting Linux on some (?) DEC Alpha systems back in the 90s. I don't remember much about the actual firmware anymore. Much like today with UEFI, the system had some low-level UI and built-in drivers to support diagnostics, disk and network booting, etc.
MILO could be installed as a boot entry in the firmware-level boot menu. MILO was a sort of stripped down Linux kernel that used its drivers to find and load the real kernel, ending with a kexec to hand over the system.
No matter how you slice it, I think you'll always come around to wanting this sort of intermediate bootloader that has a different software maintenance lifecycle from the actual kernel. It is a fine idea to reuse the same codebase and get all the breadth of drivers and capabilities, but you want the bootloader to have a very "stability" focused release cycle so it is highly repeatable.
And, I think you want a data-driven, menu/config layer to make it easy to add new kernels and allow rollback to prior kernels at runtime. I hope we don't see people eventually trying to push Android-style UX onto regular Linux computers, i.e. where the bootloader is mostly hidden and the kernel treated as if it is firmware, with at most some A/B boot selection option.
Re: No more boot loader: Please use the kernel instead
#23I personally think they're moving in the wrong direction. I'd rather have "NMIRFS" (no more initramfs). Eg, a smarter bootloader that understands all bootable filesystems and cooperates with the kernel to pre-load modules needed for boot and obviates the need for initramfs. FreeBSD's loader does this, and its so much easier to deal with. Eg, it understands ZFS, and can pre-load storage driver modules and zfs.ko for t…
FWIW, Grub has a read-only ZFS implementation to allow booting: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/grub.git/tree/include/grub...
Re: No more boot loader: Please use the kernel instead
#24I'm curious if they're proposal will be capable of handling multi-os boots. I know grub can, I can have Linux and windows and possibly even a third OS if I want. I am concerned that red hats solution the well-intended, may be rather myopic, and be commercial only. What I failed to understand, is what problem this solves for systems that I probably only reboot once or twice a year. (Given that it only works with Linux…
You can switch OS's using the UEFI menu instead. It's not always convenient, depending on your UEFI implementation, however.
Re: No more boot loader: Please use the kernel instead
#25Isn't one of the use cases in GRUB choosing which kernel you want to load?
You can use kexec to load a different Linux kernel from a Linux kernel.
Probably slower and perhaps less compatible than using GRUB though.
Re: No more boot loader: Please use the kernel instead
#26I'm curious if they're proposal will be capable of handling multi-os boots. I know grub can, I can have Linux and windows and possibly even a third OS if I want. I am concerned that red hats solution the well-intended, may be rather myopic, and be commercial only. What I failed to understand, is what problem this solves for systems that I probably only reboot once or twice a year. (Given that it only works with Linux…
Yeah, look at Windows 10 if you want to see how this can be done poorly. Its boot menu works by booting Windows 10 first and then restarting the computer if you choose another OS. This includes going all the way through POST again. Took something like two minutes end-to-end to get to Windows 7.
Re: No more boot loader: Please use the kernel instead
#27I was about to discuss/joke about the possibility of systemd absorbing this project. And hold and behold turns out there is already systemd-boot project competing in this space. I was not aware of that at all.
Re: No more boot loader: Please use the kernel instead
#28[deleted]
Re: No more boot loader: Please use the kernel instead
#29The Linux kernel is pretty easy to compile[1], but the first-party documentation for getting Linux to boot is total garbage. It's embarrassingly bad.
You end up reading third-party articles to figure out what the modern approach is to building your own Linux-based operating system, but even then, it's effectively undocumented how you're supposed to get out of a RAM fs from a ISO boot. You're on your own.
I completely reject the premise that Linux From Scratch is the way to do things, as walking through those steps, it's clear there are completely arbitrary steps thrown in, and as a result, it's basically its own distribution.
What I'd like to see is official documentation for:
+ Building Linux (exists)
- Creating an initramfs image (conflicting resources)
- Making a bootable image (conflicting resources)
- Installing the bootloader and Linux to a target disk (no resources available)
Once you've built Linux, the experience is you get to hold it in your hand and go "this is worthless."
The Linux documentation flips between recommending initramfs and not, and also pointing you to documentation that is so old it's completely irrelevant and should be removed from kernel.org.
I am never surprised the Linux desktop experience has been bad for decades, because no one cares about creating a decent installer process to begin with. You fail right out of the gate, and it makes the entire Linux bazar experience look like amateur hack hour.
[1]: https://github.com/andrewmcwatters/linux-workflow/blob/main/...
Re: No more boot loader: Please use the kernel instead
#30This kinda sounds like zfsbootmenu but without the ZFS. Which makes me wonder how hard it would be to factor out the ZFS bits and just use zfsbootmenu on other filesystems.