> The bios loads your kernel Not even that! It loads the first 512-byte sector of your boot disk and jumps to it in 16-bit mode. Usually that bit of code loads

> The bios loads your kernel Not even that! It loads the first 512-byte sector of your boot disk and jumps to it in 16-bit mode. Usually that bit of code loads in a few more sectors (using BIOS disk IO calls), enough to load a real bootloader's image (like GRUB), which subsequently understands your filesystem and loads the real kernel. It's kind of a hack but I completely agree, much better to leave it in the hands of the systems developer -- firmware that tries to do too much often just gets in the way.