Newbie here. Should I use GRUB as my bootloader?

[Kevin]

Brendan, I think you're making a few good points and are "(in general)" right, which is because you have quite a bit of experience. However, the first two words in the thread subject are "Newbie here" and that makes a big difference and renders your statements almost irrelevant here. The reason is that it changes the question from "how do I make the perfect OS?" to "how do I best start to gather experience that will eventually allow me to design a good OS?".

There is no chance that a newbie will get the design right from the start. My own first attempt anyway was definitely crap. I seem to remember that you say the same about yours. And that's okay, we both learned a lot on the way. And in the same way we shouldn't expect from newbies to create the perfect OS in the first attempt. Let them start easy (without their own bootloader, probably monolithic kernel), gather their own experience and dig deeper as they progress.

A good bootloader is fairly advanced stuff, and if you don't want to make a good one (yet), it's better not to make any.

Your own example supports this: Your bootloader is made specifically for your kernel - which means that you need to know how your kernel will work before you can even start designing it. And in order to know how the kernel works, you should probably have written one.

[kzinti]

I think that (in general) there's a massive difference between micro-kernels and monolithic kernels.

I don't know... L4 seems very happy to boot from Grub. And the bootstrapping (kickstart) doesn't look more complicated then one for a monolithic kernel.

[einzeptor]

Thanks, everyone!