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How to boot an OS directly with GRUB

Multiboot (see section `Motivation' in The Multiboot Specification) is the native format supported by GRUB. For the sake of convenience, there are also support for Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. If you want to boot other operating systems, you will have to chain-load them (see section Load another boot loader to boot unsupported operating systems).

Generally, GRUB can boot any Multiboot-compliant OS in the following steps:

1. Set GRUB's root device to the drive where the OS images are stored by the command @command{root} (see section root).
2. Load the kernel image by the command @command{kernel} (see section kernel).
3. If you need modules, load them with the command @command{module} (see section module) or @command{modulenounzip} (see section modulenounzip).
4. Run the command @command{boot} (see section boot).

Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD can be booted in a similar manner. You can load a kernel image by the command @command{kernel} and then run the command @command{boot}. If the kernel requires some parameters, just append the parameters to @command{kernel}, after the file name of the kernel. Also, please refer to section Some caveats on OS-specific issues, for the information on your OS-specific issues.

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