Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by userbinator 802 days ago
It's far from clear how grub works.

IMHO it contains enough functionality (filesystem access, user interface, program execution, etc.) that it could already be considered an OS itself.

2 comments

> it contains enough functionality [...] that it could already be considered an OS itself.

That's what ZFSBootMenu[1] is, an OS to start the OS. And as sibling points out, if you're using EFI you got an OS booting your OS booting your OS...

[1]: https://www.zfsbootmenu.org/

I originally wrote ZFSBootMenu as a reaction to how awful Grub is. I was hacking on the Grub scripts and hitting all sorts of limitations that were just awful to work around (or not possible at all). I used Grub to chain load early versions of ZBM before I had the whole UEFI application build process worked out.
efi joined the chat