After my post a few days ago about GRUB, and a boot loader discussion on the mailing lists of our local LUG, I’m reminded of Thor Lancelot Simon’s post to the NetBSD port-xen list about GRUB. He makes quite a convincing argument that GRUB is less than ideal:

The code is revolting, the user interface is opaque and highly buggy, it exhibits the “I know better than the user” interface paradigm as much as almost any system utility I’ve ever seen (note how it’s impossible to run “grub-install” on a root-on-RAID netbsd system because it *ignores* the “impossible” values in the disk map even if the correct values were hand-entered there), it is poorly documented, it doesn’t know how to pass arguments to a modern NetBSD kernel, and, even worse, the support for booting BSD kernels *at all* relies on header files copied directly from an old version of FreeBSD with their copyrights stripped off in blatant violation of the BSD license.

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