Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2017 October 23

= October 23 =

Booting linux: reading kernel and then mounting root
If I got it right, the kernel mounts the fs root. But it has to be read before by the boot loader. So, it's possible to read from the HDD without mounting it? And couldn't the boot loader mount the root file system?--B8-tome (talk) 17:39, 23 October 2017 (UTC)
 * "Mounting" just means making the file system accessible. There's no point for the boot loader to mount the root fs because there's no system running yet and there's nothing in /root that the bootloader needs. Nothing, however, keeps the bootloader from parsing the partition table, finding out the location of the partition of interest (usually /boot) and reading that in order to read the file in which the kernel lives (vmlinux and consorts in Linux.) This also could be described as "mounting", but it's not the kind of mounting the kernel does later on when it mounts /root, /home etc, and inserts the file hierarchy in that filesystem each at its respective mount point as specified in /etc/fstab.78.50.151.27 (talk) 20:08, 23 October 2017 (UTC)