[syslinux] [PATCH] chain.c32: add support for loading GRUB stage2

[Paul Bolle]

On Tue, 2010-06-08 at 19:24 +0200, Thomas Bächler wrote:
> > GRUB's loading mechanism allows to somehow provide stage2 with the
> > selected disk and partition, BSD slice, etc. (ie, to tell stage2 what
> > it's "root" is). I don't yet understand the notation used in that
> > mechanism. Besides, since stage2 images will not necessarily be loaded
> > from the disk (and partition, etc.) they were installed to, it seems
> > best to just use the first disk.
> 
> I believe that is not the purpose of stage2's "root". When stage2 is
> loaded, it looks for a file /grub/menu.lst or /boot/grub/menu.lst to
> read a configuration from. My guess is that the "root" in this case is
> the device where it looks for that file.

That seems to be what's happening. "root" is more general, though. It's
basically used as the default, well, root for all files (kernel, initrd,
configuration files, etc.) GRUB is supposed to handle.

> Without menu.lst, grub will just show a prompt. If I am right, it would
> be very useful to be able to APPEND a "root" so that a chainloaded grub
> can load a configuration file without user intervention.

GRUB's stage2 doesn't have a command line itself, does it? That implies
APPEND is not the most obvious way to supply GRUB's stage2 with
additional parameters.


Paul Bolle