grub(5) Standards, Environments, and Macros grub(5)NAMEgrub - GRand Unified Bootloader software on Solaris
DESCRIPTION
The current release of the Solaris operating system is shipped with the
GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader) software. GRUB is developed and sup‐
ported by the Free Software Foundation.
The overview for the GRUB Manual, accessible at www.gnu.org, describes
GRUB:
Briefly, a boot loader is the first software program that runs when a
computer starts. It is responsible for loading and transferring control
to an operating system kernel software (such as Linux or GNU Mach). The
kernel, in turn, initializes the rest of the operating system (for
example, a GNU [Ed. note: or Solaris] system).
GNU GRUB is a very powerful boot loader that can load a wide variety of
free, as well as proprietary, operating systems, by means of chain-
loading. GRUB is designed to address the complexity of booting a per‐
sonal computer; both the program and this manual are tightly bound to
that computer platform, although porting to other platforms may be
addressed in the future. [Ed. note: Sun has ported GRUB to the Solaris
operating system.]
One of the important features in GRUB is flexibility; GRUB understands
filesystems and kernel executable formats, so you can load an arbitrary
operating system the way you like, without recording the physical posi‐
tion of your kernel on the disk. Thus you can load the kernel just by
specifying its file name and the drive and partition where the kernel
resides.
Among Solaris machines, GRUB is supported on x86 platforms. The GRUB
software that is shipped with Solaris adds two utilities not present in
the open-source distribution:
bootadm(1M) Enables you to manage the boot archive and make
changes to the GRUB menu.
installgrub(1M) Loads the boot program from disk.
Both of these utilities are described in Solaris man pages.
Beyond these two Solaris-specific utilities, the GRUB software is
described in the GRUB manual, a PDF version of which is available from
the Sun web site. Available in the same location is the grub(8) open-
source man page. This man page describes the GRUB shell.
SEE ALSOboot(1M), bootadm(1M), installgrub(1M)
Solaris Express Installation Guide: Basic Installations
System Administration Guide: Basic Administration
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub
SunOS 5.11 21 Apr 2005 grub(5)