GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10 [LWN.net]

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

Posted Jun 25, 2009 9:15 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
Parent article: GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

> Another change is the new configuration file format, which has been entirely overhauled.

As long as they do not switch to human-unwritable XML...

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GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

Posted Jun 25, 2009 13:01 UTC (Thu) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link]

That's the first thing I though of also when I read that. I don't know what the new format is, but I'm sure someone suggested XML (they always do).

They just did

Posted Jun 25, 2009 18:59 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2009-06/msg00445.html

They just did

Posted Jun 25, 2009 20:33 UTC (Thu) by cjwatson (subscriber, #7322) [Link]

That's probably OK for the layout engine, but I think it'd be terrible for the menu itself, which does need to be human-readable and -writable even by people who aren't fond of XML. (And having syntactically-significant newlines inside XML tags is just odd ...)

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

Posted Jun 25, 2009 15:53 UTC (Thu) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]

It is some kind of scripting language. Here's part of my config:

insmod raid mdraid
set root=(md0)
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 5e0f1983-e597-4ef3-b167-e127b30b95ef
if loadfont /usr/share/grub/ascii.pf2 ; then
  set gfxmode=640x480
  insmod gfxterm
  ...
fi

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

Posted Jun 25, 2009 20:25 UTC (Thu) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

Ahh, XML.

All the readability of binary with all the efficiency of ASCII! :) Who could ask for more?

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

Posted Jun 26, 2009 7:14 UTC (Fri) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

Sadly XML does not achieve the efficiency enjoyed by most text formats, or even most text complex data serialization formats.