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Is it possible to warm-reboot Linux, directly reloading GRUB without passing through the BIOS? I have a computer whose BIOS is buggy and takes a while due to its hating my disks so if I can reboot directly to Grub it would be great.

To those that are confused: I'm looking for is a kernel module that acts to unload the kernel and execute the boot sector upon a "reboot".

Here are my system specs:

Emachines el1200-06w with an AMD athlon 64

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  • Sounds interesting... Might be possible in linux world, but seems to be tricky for you gonna skip a major step (BIOS) which dictates the booting order and initialize it.. Try updating the bios instead.. Which MDB you have?
    – BhaveshDiwan
    Jun 18, 2012 at 18:30
  • Some old piece of junk I can't even read the label on--What I'm looking for is a kernel module that acts to unload the kernel and execute the boot sector--similar to what a BIOS does.
    – nanofarad
    Jun 18, 2012 at 19:58

2 Answers 2

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You should check coreboot a Free Software project aimed at replacing the proprietary BIOS (firmware) found in most computers. coreboot performs a little bit of hardware initialization and then executes additional boot logic, called a payload.

Wiki of coreboot supported motherboards.

Extracted from here.

EDIT:

MCP55 chipset is supported. It could be that your chipset (MCP61) is supported.

Note that there is already support for your chipset MCP61 in flashrom.

Specifically check this section of coreboot wiki

I hope that I gave you some useful tips.

Hopefully we are not off-topic in askubuntu ;)

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  • 1
    Unfortunately my motherboard is not supported, but a good software(kernel module) solution looks quite feasible or even already implemented, somewhere out of my lacking observational powers.
    – nanofarad
    Jun 19, 2012 at 0:08
  • @ObsessiveFOSS: Could you list your motherboard to your question?
    – pl1nk
    Jun 19, 2012 at 6:18
  • It's some unidentifiable Emachines OEM that I would have recognized had I seen it on the supported list
    – nanofarad
    Jun 19, 2012 at 11:22
  • @ObsessiveFOSS: Well but in general attaching your hardware specifications to your question could help (possibly) to get better answer(s).
    – pl1nk
    Jun 19, 2012 at 14:40
  • Emachines el1200-06w with some unknown motherboard(really!), new 1 TB SATA hard disk(Seagate Barracuda), AMD athlon 64. dmidecode output and lspci output
    – nanofarad
    Jun 19, 2012 at 20:02
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You can try out the kexec-tools (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kexec) by installing them using

sudo apt-get install kexec-tools

and allowing them to handling reboots on installation. Try out a reboot, if your machine comes up without troubles, you're good to go. But it doesn't exen reload grub, it reboots loading the latest kernel immediately.

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