From Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Reference Guide, 2003. When a computer is turned on, the operating system is loaded into memory by a special program called a boot loader. A boot loader usually exists on the system's primary hard drive (or other media device) and has the sole responsibility of loading the Linux kernel with its required files or (in some cases) other operating systems into memory. GNU GRand Unified Boot loader or GRUB is a program which enables the user to select which installed operating system or kernel to load at system boot time. It also allows the user to pass arguments to the kernel.

The beginning of the boot process varies depending on the hardware platform being used. However, once the kernel is found and loaded by the boot loader, the default boot process is identical across all architectures. This chapter focuses primarily on the x86 architecture.

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