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Congratulations!Congratulations!Posted Jun 29, 2012 15:14 UTC (Fri) by mikemol (subscriber, #83507)In reply to: Congratulations! by alankila Parent article: GRUB 2.00 released
I have a separate boot. I'm certainly not the only one; there is still running hardware out there where the BIOS can only access a small fraction of the disk. This was made worse by the explosion in disk sizes over the ten years. If you don't use a separate /boot, you need to get lucky and hope that your GRUB1.x stage 1.5 (and 2?) are within the range BIOS can directly access.
As for the design picked by the bootloader: The filesystem drivers are modular. I expect that, if you wanted to, you could fairly trivially write a GRUB-specific filesystem driver. Heck, it could have a hardcoded table of files, with a hardcoded set of offsets at which to find them. Or it could look for a table of such values stored in a block of records at a known place...but now we're on our way to reinventing FAT.
I think you're confusing the full capability set of the Linux Kernel with the relatively meager capabilities required to understand filesystems.
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Congratulations! Posted Jun 29, 2012 16:36 UTC (Fri) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]
What I'm frustrated at is that the thing doesn't work.
With the qualifying statement that it can be made to work, if you just spend enough time.
With the wishful thinking that it could just work properly every time regardless of filesystem and RAID if it had been done differently.
I've aired enough complaints for one thread by now.
Congratulations! Posted Jun 29, 2012 19:07 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] With the wishful thinking that it could just work properly every time regardless of filesystem and RAID if it had been done differently. Except it can't. If you have dual-boot Linux/Windows system then often the only way to make the whole thing happy is to install Grub on Windows-provided NTFS partition and add it to Windows menu (search GRUB2DOS in Google for details). Now, this is obviously a PITA (why some versions of Windows kill MBR after each boot is good question) - but it works. You scheme will fall apart. And it's not obvious to me that software RAID users outnumber dual-boot systems users.
Congratulations! Posted Jul 2, 2012 13:48 UTC (Mon) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]
Let's just say that when I make a dedicated linux installation I expect to be able to use filesystem of my choice and (software) RAID solution of my choice without running into all sorts of crazy issues. I could not care less about the people who play with fire and install Linux on the same harddisk with some operating system, although I realize that it is an important use case for some people. I just think harddisks are cheap and worth the investment to avoid the need to deal with this fundamentally risky configuration where multiple operating systems are expected to cooperate one way or other.
My personal experience with GRUB has been one of long frustration because it has taken so long before it started to work properly. But hey! It wasn't a .0 release before either, so maybe I was wrong to expect it to just work. Then again, I heard a wise man say "optimism kills". I expect to run into trouble as soon as I deviate one bit from what the average person is doing.
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