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 trans‐
ferring 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 complex‐
ity of booting a personal 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 position 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 10 Installation Guide: Basic Installations
System Administration Guide: Basic Administration
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub
SunOS 5.10 21 Apr 2005 grub(5)