LWN: Comments on "GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10"

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

hop9807 — 2009-12-04T18:14:33+00:00

I find Grub 2 in ubuntu 9.10 64 bit to be a real pain. First of all there is no utility available that will allow one to edit and and it shows up with multiples of the same os if you have several hard drives but only some are actually connected to that os.

When I had to reinstall windows 7 the grub would then not load but gave a grub rescue message. None of the parameters to recover grub worked nor did any of the instructions I used from several "help forums". Ended up having to fix mbr in windows 7. I will never use grub 2 again unless a utility is developed to recover it and edit the entries.

Correction to article: No font antialiasing or mouse support yet

evgenyz — 2009-11-13T14:01:18+00:00

So, why you then just don't make this bitmap font 8-bit/pixel? With such an alpha channel you can do anti-aliasing in compile (font conversion, huh) time and simply draw it in run time ("...making the code to read the font simple than we are with writing the font.").

Size? Just complete LZMA! It will be far more simple (and faster) to implement than OpenType rendering in run time.

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

jmcnulty — 2009-09-03T15:53:17+00:00

This is what I'm looking forward to the most: being able to use disks each with just one single partition to create a single MD raid device with LVM on top containing LVs for boot, swap and /.

That way I can assign another disk as a spare raid disk and have the loss of one whole disk replaced by another whole disk. Right now I can't do that as I have to partition both disks into two and create two raid devices: one for /boot and one for LVM. I can't assign spare disk to each of these as loss of a disk would try and map two spare disks to replace two partitions. Well, either that or it would fall flat on its face. It's so dumb I've not even tried it. GRUB2 solves this dilemma, so it can't arrive fast enough for me.

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

obi — 2009-07-05T16:53:55+00:00

I've got boxes with root on crypto on lvm2 on md (raid1), and boot on lvm2 on md (raid1). Grub2 can deal with it without difficulty.

As for grub2 on a volume without a partition table - I'll have to try it out.

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

muwlgr — 2009-07-04T20:54:47+00:00

LILO works well for me, boots my systems from md/raid1 array.
Don't know why throw it away and replace with GRUB2.
The only warts for LILO I noticed for the years are: lack of LVM/LVM2 support (especially if your LVM PVs are created on md arrays themselves), and that it searches for MBRs only on hard disks with BIOS number 0x80 and higher, so fails on BIOSes that assign removable drive numbers for your USB flash (0x2..0x7f).
For me, GRUB1 lacks a feature that I often used and liked in LILO: to create a filesystem on the entire unpartitioned volume
(like, mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb) and then to install a bootloader into its boot sector, i.e. the case when you don't have partition table at all. Don't know if GRUB2 could do that. Anyone knows ?

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

abpsoft — 2009-07-04T09:58:05+00:00

Calling it solved is a bit bold - that xfs_freeze hack has the tendency of freezing - indeed - the whole box solid, provided that system has / (including /boot) on XFS and an unsuspecting admin tries to run grub-install. That hack might work when run from d-i, but in a live system (let's say, after upgrading from etch to lenny and pondering whether it may be time to finally replace LILO) it's a disaster. It should at least print a big fat warning before actually freezing a live FS that might have plenty of write activity.

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

The_Barbarian — 2009-07-01T08:02:56+00:00

Or for GPT, grub is normally put into the BIOS boot partition or the EFI system partition.

Maintenance of GRUB 1

giraffedata — 2009-06-27T19:52:44+00:00

In my opinion, instead of complaining that GRUB 1 has been abandoned, one of the distros should have taken over the maintenance.

But what they're complaining about is that it's too much work to maintain even for their own use. Maintaining it for everybody would be even more work, so how is that an alternative to complaining?

This just looks to me like a classic case of open source users exploiting the free work of others (original maintainers of GRUB 1), then being sorry when those folks choose to stop providing. So they complain (nothing wrong with that), and look around for the next best free offering to exploit, which in this case may be GRUB 2.

The GRUB story was something of a shock because the GRUB 1 developers abandonned it (to the point of branding it "legacy," effectively discouraging people from using it) so they could work on something newer, but did so long before the new thing was at least as good as the old one (missing documentation was the biggest regression I saw). It doesn't usually happen that way.

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

k8to — 2009-06-26T07:14:42+00:00

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

Correction to article: No font antialiasing or mouse support yet

colinb — 2009-06-26T04:49:02+00:00

Also, a quick correction to the article, which states:

With respect to the technical qualities of GRUB 2, Rintel is mostly impressed about GRUB 2's modular architecture. He calls other features such as the graphics subsystem with mouse support capable of rendering antialiased Unicode glyphs "hardly things that would convince anyone to switch to GRUB 2".

Actually, mouse support has not been added yet, though USB support has recently been added, and I'm about to commit the graphical menu branch to GRUB's mainline, so mouse support is not far off. Rendering antialiased text is not supported with the current bitmap-based fonts. If and when we add support for font rendering with FreeType, then we will have antialiased text rendering.

Regards,

Colin

Rhaaa, yet another font format!

colinb — 2009-06-26T04:39:23+00:00

As the author of the graphical menu support in GRUB 2 and the creator of the new font format, I can defend the decision to create a new font format in a few ways. First, it was decided at the beginning of the graphical menu project that bitmap fonts should be used at first, and possibly down the road we could add support for vector (outline) fonts, and we would definitely need to depend on an external library for the more complex rendering of vector fonts. There has been discussion of using the FreeType library to provide support for OpenType, TrueType, and many other font formats. In my opinion, full vector font support would not be too difficult to add to GRUB.

As for using an existing bitmap font format such as BDF of PCF, I seriously considered them but found them altogether unsatisfactory for our specific purpose. Here is my analysis of why another font format was needed. We also have discussed plans to add LZMA compression support to the font format, which would dramatically improve storage efficiency without impacting performance, by providing near-random access to characters of the font through compressing groups of characters together.

As for the omission of the 'width' property of fonts, I simply considered that too unimportant of a detail, particularly in light of the fact that non-antialiased bitmap fonts were the only target of that font format, and none of the free fonts we tested with were provided in different widths.

I do take your point about ASCII metadata for the fonts. True textual data such as the font name and family name should be Unicode strings, not ASCII.

Regards,

Colin

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

cjwatson — 2009-06-25T20:36:06+00:00

It was at least solved in recent Debian versions of GRUB Legacy by way of xfs_freeze -f/-u, so in the worst case it'd be straightforward to apply the same hack for GRUB 2; I forget where this came up, but I understand that the XFS kernel code itself is also better at handling freeze/thaw now in a way that isn't quite so unfriendly to GRUB.

They just did

cjwatson — 2009-06-25T20:33:29+00:00

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

martinfick — 2009-06-25T20:25:45+00:00

Ahh, XML.

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

They just did

proski — 2009-06-25T18:59:53+00:00

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

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

proski — 2009-06-25T16:31:55+00:00

GRUB 2 don't require direct writing to any filesystem for installation. Direct read access to the filesystem at the installation time is possible, but it's discouraged, and it's not the default mode of operation. The default is embedding the core into the sectors following the MBR (master boot record, the first sector of the hard drive).

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

alankila — 2009-06-25T15:53:36+00:00

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

alankila — 2009-06-25T15:50:17+00:00

As far as I remember, the issue is not actually writing to the disk bypassing the FS. It is the fact that XFS can consider files stored only in the journal as committed on the disk, and then later on moves the data from the journal to the final locations. GRUB 1's XFS module used to ignore the journal, so it might not see the most recent versions of all files. I also don't know if the grub installation procedure might embed sector locations for boot files while they still exist only in the journal.

Sadly, I don't know if this problem has been solved.

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

jengelh — 2009-06-25T13:55:37+00:00

GRUB1 used to write to the disk directly, bypassing the linux fs. That did not fare well with delayed-allocation based filesystems, most notably xfs, but it also effects ext3 to a certain degree. Did they fix that in GRUB2?

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

clugstj — 2009-06-25T13:01:59+00:00

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).

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

ikm — 2009-06-25T11:44:32+00:00

Thanks for the great article, made a nice read.

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

marcH — 2009-06-25T09:15:23+00:00

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

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

Rhaaa, yet another font format!

nim-nim — 2009-06-25T09:00:45+00:00

So they felt they needed to invent a new font format. Couldn't they really use one of the numerous existing ones? (restricting possibly to a specific profile with a profile checker).

They claim they want unicode support but specify ascii metadata.

And they've forgotten the third style attribute in modern (CSS/WPF) font classifications, width.

http://blogs.msdn.com/text/attachment/2249036.ashx
http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/typotechnica2007/Font...

Now that Apple, Adobe and Microsoft finally agreed on a common universal font format (OpenType) do we actually need a new platform-specific application-specific one?

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/tt/sbit.htm

Maintenance of GRUB 1

proski — 2009-06-25T01:37:32+00:00

In my opinion, instead of complaining that GRUB 1 has been abandoned, one of the distros should have taken over the maintenance. It's hard to get volunteers to maintain the old version. And it's really not too much work. The patches for GRUB 1 are floating around. And the immediate benefit would be the ability to install the whole system on ext4.

LWN: Comments on "GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10"

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

Correction to article: No font antialiasing or mouse support *yet*

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

Maintenance of GRUB 1

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

Correction to article: No font antialiasing or mouse support *yet*

Rhaaa, yet another font format!

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

They just did

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

They just did

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

GRUB 2 becomes the default bootloader in Ubuntu 9.10

Rhaaa, yet another font format!

Maintenance of GRUB 1

Correction to article: No font antialiasing or mouse support yet

Correction to article: No font antialiasing or mouse support yet