[syslinux] Stumped by extlinux After OS Upgrade
Gene Cumm
gene.cumm at gmail.com
Wed Nov 3 14:52:33 PDT 2010
On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 09:37, <John.Florian at dart.biz> wrote:
>> From: Ferenc Wagner <wferi at niif.hu>
>
>> > extlinux doesn't understand file systems like, say grub, does it?
>>
>> Extlinux and Grub both have various "stages". The difference is that
>> the second stage of Extlinux, which understands the filesystem, itself
>> resides in the boot filesystem, while it resides in the slack area for
>> Grub. This is why you can break Extlinux with filesystem operations, by
>> messing with its second stage. However, starting with the config file
>> everything is read by the filesystem code, so they are safe to play with
>> (doing so does not require bootloader interaction, like LILO does).
>
> Thanks for that excellent detail. Just to make sure I fully understand
> this, you're saying that the 2nd stage is responsible for finding, reading
> and interpreting the config file, right? Further, the first stage expects
> to find the second stage in the boot file system, but the first stage
> doesn't understand ext file systems. Only the 2nd stage understands ext
> file systems.
>
> How does the first stage actually find the 2nd stage?
> --
> John Florian
Sect1Ptr, a static pointer to the next sector in the real file,
patched by the installer.
--
-Gene
More information about the Syslinux
mailing list