[UFO Chicago] debian woody on an imac rev. b -- success! (fwd)

[Nick Moffitt]

begin  Uncle Pedro  quotation:
> That's what I learned from doing it/reading the yaboot manpage. I'm
> rather hazy myself on how the whole MBR/lilo marriage works though,
> so someone who understands those things better might be a more
> useful resource.

	Here's my standard ramble about LILO:

What people call "lilo" is actually three things:  /sbin/lilo,
/etc/lilo.conf, and LILO.

/etc/lilo.conf is the source code to LILO, compiled by /sbin/lilo.
What /sbin/lilo does is read /etc/lilo.conf and use the values therein
to construct a teensy machine-level program that contains the location
of the first block on disk where the kernel resides.  It then puts
this program (LILO) in the MBR of the disk you specify.

The BIOS finds the disk on boot, loads the MBR into core, and jumps
in.  LILO starts running and prompts you for minor info before loading
the first block of the kernel in memory and jumping into THAT.

The start of the kernel usually knows enough to grab the rest and
uncompress it.  All this is done with NO KNOWLEDGE OF THE UNDERLYING
FILESYSTEM AT ALL!

By contrast, most non-PC hardware typically bootstraps in increasingly
intelligent bootloaders until one of them is loaded which can read the
filesystem on disk.  Then it looks for /unix or whatever and loads it.
I think BSD uses three stages of bootloader, the last one being a
FORTH tool not entirely unlike OpenFirmware.

-- 
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property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its
jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." 
  -- US Constitution, Amendment XIV, on the rights of non-citizens