In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> you write: > >Reading quickly the things supported, I think those things can be >passed from the loader to the kernel using the multiboot >specification. FreeBSD doesn't need to abandon its bootloader and the >way of doing things, just change it to use the multiboot >specification. That way you could use the FreeBSD loader for every >kernel and every multiboot-compliant bootloader for the FreeBSD kernel.
You should be reading the man pages for the -CURRENT boot loader, because it has changed significantly since 4.X. The loader is responsible for: (1) passing boot flags for things like single-user mode, etc. (2) passing environment variables, such as boot-time tunables (size of static data structures in the kernel etc.) and unprobeable device information (mostly for non-PnP ISA). (The latter is new in -CURRENT.) (3) pre-linking modules into the kernel; the kernel itself doesn't have to include all the drivers needed to boot on a machine. Does GRUB include a linker? Tony.