The GRUB emulator is used as a debugging utility but it could also be
used as a user-space bootloader if there is support to boot an operating
system.
The Linux kernel is already able to (re)boot another kernel via the
kexec boot mechanism. So the grub-emu tool could rely on this feature
and have linux and initrd commands that are used to pass a kernel,
initramfs image and command line parameters to kexec for booting
a selected menu entry.
By default the systemctl kexec option is used so systemd can shutdown
all of the running services before doing a reboot using kexec. But if
this is not present, it can fall back to executing the kexec user-space
tool directly. The ability to force a kexec-reboot when systemctl kexec
fails must only be used in controlled environments to avoid possible
filesystem corruption and data loss.
Signed-off-by: Raymund Will <rw@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: John Jolly <jjolly@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: Javier Martinez Canillas <javierm@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Robbie Harwood <rharwood@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Daniel Kiper <daniel.kiper@oracle.com>
e364307f6a
