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LPC: Booting and systemdLPC: Booting and systemdPosted Sep 15, 2011 13:20 UTC (Thu) by dan_a (subscriber, #5325)In reply to: LPC: Booting and systemd by alankila Parent article: LPC: Booting and systemd
> Maybe we should just go back to LILO. Why boot an intermediate kernel with some added complexity if you can just boot the real one, instead.
I quite enjoy doing kernel upgrades with GRUB. If you've never seen a system with a blank screen except for "LI" then you've not been using Linux very long!
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LPC: Booting and systemd Posted Sep 15, 2011 15:02 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]
Even GRUB isn't as friendly as it could be; I have often longed for a simple file browser with 'cd' and 'ls' commands to find the kernel and initrd to boot. Part of what makes it awkward is LVM, which isn't very discoverable (there's no command to 'list available LVM devices and ask me which ones to mount', least of all from the GRUB command line), so it will be great when LVM goes away.
A simple command interpreter built into the kernel would also be a great help, e.g. when it can't find the root filesystem or /sbin/init.
LPC: Booting and systemd Posted Sep 15, 2011 15:12 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]
GRUB does have a limited command line allowing some level of file browsing, as I recall.
LPC: Booting and systemd Posted Sep 16, 2011 14:38 UTC (Fri) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
GRUB2 does support LVM, but I prefer to always use a non-LVM /boot partition. In fact, if everyone used boring filesystems such as ext3 for /boot, there would be no need for exotic filesystems in GRUB at all. Since /boot is small, slow changing and rarely needs resizing, I can't see the point of anything beyond ext3.
LPC: Booting and systemd Posted Sep 19, 2011 9:33 UTC (Mon) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]
The difficulty is in having a separate /boot at all. You must allocate a fixed amount of space which is either too little or too much. With a 500 gigabyte disk it doesn't matter but on a netbook with a four gigabyte SSD it is painful to lose 10% of it to /boot.
Earlier Fedora releases gave about a hundred megs to /boot but then cannot be upgraded to the latest Fedora version, since the upgrade process needs to put a disk image in there too. (There is a way to download the disk image over the network but for me it always hangs.)
LPC: Booting and systemd Posted Sep 20, 2011 9:56 UTC (Tue) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
If your only disk is a 4GB SSD on a notebook, don't use a separate /boot - just use ext3. You probably won't need LVM either.
LPC: Booting and systemd Posted Sep 20, 2011 16:06 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
When I had my 4GB SSD netbook, I did something like a 70MB ext2 /boot, 2GB /, 512MB of swap, and the rest for /home. If everything were /, I would have to format anyways for an upgrade (not enough space for the RPMs to upgrade with[1]). I also remember doing lvresize and other fun things to go from a 2GB /home to a 2GB / instead. Haven't used LVM since.
[1]I actually did do a yum upgrade (from F10 to F11 IIRC) on the machine. The RPMs fit, but not with the upgrade going. I ended up having to SIGSTOP yum, delete cached RPMs that had finished installing for disk space, and the SIGCONT yum again. Not something I plan on doing again. Especially during class.
LPC: Booting and systemd Posted Sep 15, 2011 18:06 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
I much prefer fixing and troubleshooting lilo boot problems compared to grub boot problems
yes, it's easier to trigger lilo problems, but when grub doesn't just 'do the right thing', figuring out how to fix it seems to be much harder.
LPC: Booting and systemd Posted Sep 16, 2011 17:19 UTC (Fri) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203) [Link]
> If you've never seen a system with a blank screen except for
> "LI" then you've not been using Linux very long!
Well what is old is now new again. GRUB2 requires running an installer after any change, such as installing a newly built kernel. Forget that step and kaboom! Well you get the old config with no mention of the newly installed kernel if you weren't so unwise as to get rid of the current running kernel before rebooting but we still went backward with GRUB2.
LPC: Booting and systemd Posted Sep 16, 2011 17:34 UTC (Fri) by jrn (subscriber, #64214) [Link]
> GRUB2 requires running an installer after any change, such as installing a newly built kernel. Forget that step and kaboom!
Forget that step and you have to type the name of the kernel by hand, you mean, right?
LPC: Booting and systemd Posted Sep 22, 2011 22:29 UTC (Thu) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
Does Grub2 do USB?
Many mobos do not do proper USB->PS2 emulation (some don't do it at all) so if all you have is a usb keyboard, you're stuffed. You can't tell grub which option you want so you get the choice of default, default or default. Tough luck if your upgrade broke but you made that the default in order to test it ...
For example, my mobo is broken some of the time - kernel upgrades are a pain because I never know whether my keyboard is going to work with grub or not :-(
Cheers,
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