grub(5) - osol9

1grub(5)               Standards, Environments, and Macros              grub(5)
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NAME

6       grub - GRand Unified Bootloader software on Solaris
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DESCRIPTION

9       The current release of the Solaris operating system is shipped with the
10       GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader) software.  GRUB is developed  and  sup‐
11       ported by the Free Software Foundation.
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14       The  overview for the GRUB Manual, accessible at www.gnu.org, describes
15       GRUB:
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18       Briefly, a boot loader is the first software program that runs  when  a
19       computer starts. It is responsible for loading and transferring control
20       to an operating system kernel software (such as Linux or GNU Mach). The
21       kernel,  in  turn,  initializes  the  rest of the operating system (for
22       example, a GNU [Ed. note: or Solaris] system).
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25       GNU GRUB is a very powerful boot loader that can load a wide variety of
26       free,  as  well  as  proprietary, operating systems, by means of chain-
27       loading. GRUB is designed to address the complexity of booting  a  per‐
28       sonal  computer;  both the program and this manual are tightly bound to
29       that computer platform, although porting  to  other  platforms  may  be
30       addressed  in the future. [Ed. note: Sun has ported GRUB to the Solaris
31       operating system.]
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34       One of the important features in GRUB is flexibility; GRUB  understands
35       filesystems and kernel executable formats, so you can load an arbitrary
36       operating system the way you like, without recording the physical posi‐
37       tion  of  your kernel on the disk. Thus you can load the kernel just by
38       specifying its file name and the drive and partition where  the  kernel
39       resides.
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42       Among  Solaris  machines,  GRUB is supported on x86 platforms. The GRUB
43       software that is shipped with Solaris adds two utilities not present in
44       the open-source distribution:
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46       bootadm(1M)        Enables  you  to  manage  the  boot archive and make
47                          changes to the GRUB menu.
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50       installgrub(1M)    Loads the boot program from disk.
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54       Both of these utilities are described in Solaris man pages.
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57       Beyond these two  Solaris-specific  utilities,  the  GRUB  software  is
58       described  in the GRUB manual, a PDF version of which is available from
59       the Sun web site.  Available in the same location is the grub(8)  open-
60       source man page.  This man page describes the GRUB shell.
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NAME

DESCRIPTION

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