On 01/10/16 12:44, Edward Bartolo wrote:
> As far as I
> am concerned, as long as a boot-loader can read GPT and MSDOS disks
> plus extN partitions, that should be enough.
>

That's nice. You have a beautifully simple use case.

*I* need a bootloader that can sort through various partition/RAID
configurations and find it's config no matter where the BIOS puts the
disk, if it's plugged into different hardware or if it's booted from a
floppy/USB/CDROM and load the kernel/initramfs from ext or FAT
partitions. It also needs to be able to skip over disks that are too
dead to read, but alive enough to take up BIOS slots. Ohter people need
to be able to boot from xfs, jffs, reiserfs, btrfs.. the list goes on.

My use case is different from yours, and what works for you won't work
for me (having said that what works for me will work for you, it's just
a lot larger and more complex to configure).

Don't go trying to re-invent the wheel or simplify things because *you*
don't need the complex case. Some of us do and that's why there are
multiple bootloaders available.

If you think the common bootloaders are becoming bloated, do some
reading on LAB (Linux As a Bootloader) and see what bloat really means.
Yes, that was a special case for embeded hardware, but none the less the
point stands.