Rusky wrote:
You seem to be confusing multiboot and grub? All of LILO, Grub, Syslinux, etc. use Linux's boot protocol. All of ones that boot Windows use chainloading. At no point is multiboot involved.
GRUB is a
MultiBoot loader, and in fact was originally intended as the reference implementation of the MultiBoot protocol - part of the reason its UI is so shallow and minimal is because the expectation was that other implementations would follow. GRUB is, or at least was, meant only to demonstrate how the MultiBoot Protocol works.
Windows is chainloaded on all MB loaders because Windows
doesn't support MB, and in fact doesn't work with any loader other than its own. The provision for chainloading was a core feature of MBP from the start, because the whole point was to make it easier for Linux and Windows to exist on the same box. Windows doesn't play well with others, hence the need for chainloading.
What surprises me is that multi-booting - or even single-booting an OS directly on bare metal - is still a thing at all. I would have expected that the use of hypervisors (with a rump OS that just lets you launch and switch between OSes) would be universal by now, but given the massive pain that can be involved in using either HyperV or Xen I suppose I can see why. Also, a lot of people can't afford the memory and disk space to make it feasible - I know I can't - but still, I would expect it to be the rule rather than the exception, even for consumers who would have no need or wish to run multiple systems.