Operating System Design/Initialization/Bootloader

A boot loader is a small program which is started from the Master Boot Record (MBR) of a hard disk, floppy disk, CD/DVD or other storage device. It is loaded by the computer's BIOS after the BIOS has initialized a small portion of the system's hardware. The role of a boot loader is to load an operating system from a storage device, set up a minimal environment in which the OS can run, and run the operating system's startup procedure.

Due to the fact that on most systems (most notably the IA-32 IBM compatible systems), the boot loader is only allowed to have a very small size, (510 effective bytes on a floppy disk, 446 bytes on a hard disk), the boot loader is usually split into stages. Stage 1 will load stage 2 from a specific sector on the disk, then stage 2 will initialize the system and load the kernel from a specific file on the disk. This means that the stage 2 boot loader will have to be able to interpret the system's file system. Sometimes, an extra stage (commonly called stage 1.5) is placed between stage 1 and stage 2, which is also capable of interpreting the file system, and allows the stage 2 boot loader to be moved around the disk, possibly due to disk defragmentation or editing of the stage 2 boot loader.

Often, boot loaders allow the user to select between several different operating systems, and choose which one to boot. This feature is called multi booting (or dual-booting). Many boot loaders also support passing parameters to the kernel. These are like command-line arguments, and are generally used to tell the kernel about the configuration of the system. Some even load 'modules' into memory for the OS.

LILO, GRUB and GRUB2
For *nix users, the LILO and GRUB boot loaders are the most common. Apart from booting Linux, they can boot Windows using chain loading. Microsoft Windows has its own proprietary boot loader.

LILO is the LI nux LO ader.

GRUB is the acronym for the GR and U nified B oot loader. GRUB is popular among operating system developers because it can bring the system to 32-bit protected mode without much effort, after which the kernel can be started as if it were any other application. GRUB supports the Multiboot Specification, which specifies how any kernel can be loaded by GRUB.

The next version of GRUB, GRUB2, supports 64-bit systems and will have a new extensible implementation of the Multiboot Specification.

ReactOS Bootloader (FreeLoader)
The ReactOS bootloader is the bootloader from the ReactOS project. It supports only FAT, but can load Windows, ReactOS and Multiboot kernels as well.