From: Alessandro Rubini <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: documentation question
Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 16:47:48 +0200
> One of my objection is the absolutely pc-centric attitude of both
> documents, which can be smoothed at no cost. Since I run 10 different
> platforms, I feel this as a bug: the fact that GRUB is currently
> pc-only tool should be an accident more than a design choice.
I disagree. The mechanism to boot up a computer varies from
architecture to architecture very much, so basically any boot loader
depends on the system architecture the boot loader supports too
much. For example, most workstations and some personal computers (such
as SparcStation and iMac) has a built-in firmware program, while IBM
PC has BIOS instead. Some of the architectures have the concept "MBR",
while others don't. The format of partition tables is not the
same. And so on. Therefore, the design of GRUB is specialized to PC
architecture (e.g. there is no need to split it into two stages, if
you write a boot loader for HP workstations). I agree if you say that
it is bad that the Multiboot Specification is designed only for PC,
though.
> Also, it sometimes looks like the language is strange. Sure I am not
> a native speaker, but some sentences look very strange to me. May I dare
> suggest some (minor) linguistic fixes or should I consider that the language
> is ok? (example: "enough small to be fit in a MBR").
Report all of them. I'm not a native speaker, either.
Okuji
