Re: Possible to boot NetBSD with GRUB?

[Richard Kreuter]

On Wed, May 15, 2002 at 07:44:39PM +0200, Thierry Laronde wrote:
> On Wed, May 15, 2002 at 12:05:55AM -0400, address@hidden wrote:
> > Without going into too many of the technical details, is it
> > currently possible to get NetBSD or OpenBSD booted using GRUB?  Or
> > do these OS's only work with their own bootmanagers?
> 
> There have been some patches some time ago for FreeBSD (IIRC), but
> consider that at the moment the *BSD are not _natively_ supported. This
> means that you can not have GRUB booting _directly_ the kernel. But GRUB
> can chainload the bootloaders of the *BSD.

  I don't know whether this method is still being maintained, but the
documented way for NetBSD works [1] for me, with NetBSD 1.5.2 and
grub-0.91 (I might be wrong about the version of grub): for example,
from the command prompt,

kernel --type=netbsd (hd0,2,a)/netbsd 

and in menu.lst,

title NetBSD
root (hd0,2,a)
kernel --type=netbsd /netbsd
boot

[1] The manual says that there is no way from the GRUB command line to
pass paramters to/through netbsd, the kernel.  So there is a stage of
NetBSD's boot where it prompts for the root partition, swap partition,
and root fs type.  Of course, this means you can't boot to single-user
mode, for example.

Hope that helps,
Richard