grub doesn't know ufs filesystem

[Micah]

RW wrote:
> On Wednesday 14 December 2005 16:36, Micah wrote:
> 
>>Some of the grubs that ship with Linux distros 
>>do not support ufs.   
> 
> 
> I'm curious as to why people care about this so much. There are numerous 
> threads about whether or not particular bootloaders support UFS.
> 
> A bootloader needs to understand Linux filesystems to boot Linux off a logical 
> partition, but BSDs slices are always on primary partitions. Is there really 
> any advantage to going directly to /boot/loader, rather than simply chaining?

I used chainloading for a while until I wanted multiple installs of 
FreeBSD on the same drive.  Using chainloading from grub always booted 
the first FreeBSD regardless of which slice was specified in menu.lst. 
Changing it to use /boot/loader allowed me to actually have more than 
one FreeBSD on the same drive.

Also, grub places some files on a host filesystem.  It may be more 
convenient to have those files stored on UFS rather than FAT or EXT.  Or 
you may have a system that consists only of multiple FreeBSD installs. 
In that case, if you use grub (rather than FreeBSD's manager), you'd 
have to make a partition solely for grub.

HTH,
Micah