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Booting is simply the process of starting up the system when the
computer is powered on. The computer's BIOS (the Basic
Input/Output System which is programmed into the hardware of the
computer) takes charge and decides what is to be done. Usually the
BIOS first runs a Power-On-Self-Test (POST) and then looks for
boot information which typically resides in the Master Boot Record
(MBR) of the hard drive (or in general the boot sector of any
available device).
For a GNU/Linux system the MBR contains a boot loader like
lilo
of grub. These will give you choices of
operating systems to boot whenever you reboot your computer. To
install a boot loader you will either overwrite the master boot record
with one that will start up lilo, or, for MS/Windows/NT, you
will add extra information in a configuration file to identify, for
MS/Windows/NT, how to boot into GNU/Linux. The grub
boot
loader is quite a bit more flexible than LILO and is often a good
choice.
Lilo
is the traditional GNU/Linux boot manager (and
silo
is the boot manager for Sparc GNU/Linux). A newer
alternative that may replace lilo
is the GNU
grub
(GRand Unified Bootloader). Grub can be set up to
automatically identify newly installed kernels, making the
installation of new kernels quite straightforward. Another emerging
alternative is xosl, the extended OS loader.
If you are using a GNU/Linux boot loader such as Grub then the Grub
code will be loaded into memory and executed. Grub takes on the task
of then loading an operating system, such as the GNU/Linux kernel.
More information about the process is available from
https://www.tldp.org/LDP/sag/index.html.
In this chapter we also explore issues around dual booting.
See Chapter 47 for what happens once the Linux kernel
starts booting.
Subsections
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