3.2 Modules

This is outdated.

Because the microkernel does not provide filesystem support and other features necessary to load the first system task from a storage medium, the first task is loaded by the bootloader as a module to a specified address. In the GNU system, this first program is the serverboot executable. GNU Mach inserts the host control port and the device master port into this task and appends the port numbers to the command line before executing it.

The serverboot program is responsible for loading and executing the rest of the Hurd servers. Rather than containing specific instructions for starting the Hurd, it follows general steps given in a user-supplied boot script.

XXX More about boot scripts.