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Linux-Bootloader-1.3
River stage zero No dependents
/ Linux::Bootloader::Detect

NAME

Linux::Bootloader::Detect - detects the bootloader and architecture of the system.

SYNOPSIS

Attempts to determine the bootloader by checking for configuration files for grub, lilo, elilo and yaboot then searching the master boot record for GRUB, LILO, ELILO and YABOOT.

Determines the architecture by running uname -m.

DESCRIPTION

To attempt to discover the bootloader being used by the system detect_bootloader first calls detect_bootloader_from_conf attempts to locate /boot/grub/menu.lst, /etc/lilo.conf, /boot/efi/elilo.conf and /etc/yaboot.conf and returns the corresponding bootloader name. If either undef of multiple are returned because no configuration files or multiple configuration files were found detect_bootloader calls detect_bootloader_from_mbr which generates a list of all devices accessable from the /dev directory reading in the first 512 bytes from each hd and sd device using head then redirects the output to grep to determine if "GRUB", "LILO", "ELILO" or "YABOOT" is present returning the corresponding value if exactly one mbr on the system contained a bootloader or multiple if more than one was found and undef if none were found. detect_bootloader returns either grub, lilo, elilo, yaboot or undef.

To attempt to discover the architecture of the system detect_architecture makes a uname -m system call returning x86, ppc, ia64 or undef.

FUNCTIONS

detect_architecture([style])

Input: Output: string

This function determines the architecture by calling uname -m. By default it will report back exactly what uname -m reports, but if you specify a "style", detect_architecture will do some mappings. Possible styles include:

 Style    Example return values (not an exhaustive list...)
 [none]   i386, i686, sparc, sun4u, ppc64, s390x, x86_64, parisc64
 linux    i386, i386, sparc, sparc, ppc64, s390,  x86_64, parisc
 gentoo    x86,  x86, sparc, sparc, ppc64,         amd64, hppa

Returns undef on error.

detect_bootloader(['device1', 'device2', ...])

Input: devices to detect against (optional) Output: string

This function attempts to determine the bootloader being used on the system by first checking for conf files and then falling back to check the master boot record.

Possible return values:

    grub        grub was determined to be the bootloader in use
    lilo        lilo was determined to be is the bootloader in use
    elilo       elilo was determined to be the bootloader in use
    yaboot      yaboot was determined to be the bootloader in use
    undef       it was impossible to determine which bootloader was being used
                due either to configuration files for multiple bootloaders or
                bootloader on multiple hard disks

detect_bootloader_from_conf()

Detects bootloaders by the presence of config files. This is not as reliable of a mechanism as looking in the MBR, but tends to be significantly faster.

If called in list context, it will return a list of the bootloaders that it found.

If called in scalar context and only a single bootloader config file is present it will return the name of that bootloader. Otherwise, if multiple (or no) bootloaders are detected, it will return undef.

detect_bootloader_from_mbr([@devices])

Detects the bootloader by scanning the master boot record (MBR) of the specified devices (or all devices if not indicated).

The device arguments must be relative to the /dev/ directory. I.e., ('hda', 'sdb', 'cdroms/cdrom0', etc.)

AUTHOR

Open Source Development Labs, Engineering Department <eng@osdl.org>

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (C) 2006 Open Source Development Labs All Rights Reserved.

This script is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

SEE ALSO

Linux::Bootloader