Tribblix: manual page: grub.7

GRUB(7) Standards, Environments, and Macros GRUB(7)

NAME

grub - 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
supported 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 transferring
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 complexity 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(8)
Enables you to manage the boot archive and make
changes to the GRUB menu.

installgrub(8)
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.

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