going back to grub after boot??

Person_1873 · 02-08-2008, 05:01 AM

is there any way to load stage2 back into memory then dump you kernel so that you could boot another OS without a complete reboot?

Uncle_Theodore · 02-08-2008, 05:09 AM

You probably want kexec
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/li...y/l-kexec.html

syg00 · 02-08-2008, 05:47 AM

Not if [s]he wants to boot "another OS". Not to mention you have to go through re-boot.

Person_1873 · 02-08-2008, 05:56 AM

so can someone explain to me WHY this can't be done? i mean, i see no reason that you couldn't have like an internal bootloader to boot a separate OS, i mean, there's linload for DOS which does exactly what i want and there's no winload or whatever? how backward is that?
you can even get bootloaders for running from inside psp firmware and Pocket PC's, i mean, come on, where's the difference, why can't you just have an application that calls 000000:07C000 of your MBR and just dump your RAM? i don't see why this is so hard!

Matir · 02-08-2008, 07:04 AM

If you don't see why it's so hard, then please implement it. Especially the parts where you go through and reset the state of every piece of hardware on the system. And don't forget the need to switch back into real mode, which is sortof interesting in the sense that you'll need the currently running kernel to do it. I'm not sure what the problem with rebooting is -- it's designed to do hardware initialization, after all.

Person_1873 · 02-10-2008, 10:43 PM

thankyou for telling me why it's so hard, finally an explanation, why didn't someone just say "ever heard of catch 22"