Re: Gone are the happy days [LWN.net]

Re: Gone are the happy days

Posted Jun 29, 2012 13:17 UTC (Fri) by utoddl (subscriber, #1232)
In reply to: GRUB 2.00 released by alspnost
Parent article: GRUB 2.00 released

I used to try to let all my installed distros share a /boot partition, but I got tired of fixing up grub.conf and/or menu.lst after each update. So for the last several years I've had a dedicated non-distro based "master" boot partition with a hand-installed GRUB, the only purpose of which was to chainload to the various distro specific GRUBs on distro specific boot partitions. This has worked well for years.

Now that GRUB has taken "Grand Unified" to heart and gone all probey on me and no longer wants to install boot code into anything other than the root of a disc, I suppose I'll have to come up with another strategy. Perhaps going back to a common /boot partition for all the distros is the way to go.

How do you, my fellow LWN readers, handle boot partition issues with multiple distros on one box? I'm looking for a strategy that works with rather than against the expectations of the various distros and how they do updates.

(Log in to post comments)

Re: Gone are the happy days

Posted Jun 30, 2012 0:31 UTC (Sat) by ralphdegennaro (subscriber, #35718) [Link]

I have a test box that I've done same and would like to do the same. I know it's a corner case to have Fedora, openSuse, Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Mageia on small test partitions. It'd be nice to have that setup work out-of-box tough.

What I could see as still problematic with a shared /boot is if distros have different versions of GRUB. When you do the install, each overwrites the other, right? And updates might create the wrong versioned config too, right? Excuse my ignorance if I'm confused...

I'll probably still end up installing one minimal to its own partition with its GRUB to sda. And then each distro's GRUB to their sda#. Last I looked, some OS's installers (like PC-BSD or other unmentionables) didn't support putting their boot loader not to the MBR. So I'll still need a USB stick to fix the "OS agnostic". Oh well....

Re: Gone are the happy days

Posted Jul 10, 2012 16:04 UTC (Tue) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

Grub2 offers the commands extract_entries_source and extract_legacy_entries_source, which read menu entries from another grub2/grub legacy configuration file. You can place these commands in your custom.cfg (usually /boot/grub{,2}/custom.cfg). I use them to read one distro's boot loader configuration from another one's so that in the end, all entries end up in the same menu. It makes sense to disable the os-prober script in /etc/grub.d when using this approach, otherwise you'll get many redundant entries.