Gentoo Resisting?

Posted Nov 29, 2014 19:17 UTC (Sat) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
In reply to: Gentoo Resisting? by Wol
Parent article: The "Devuan" Debian fork

Yeah, likewise. If I'm "resisting" using systemd in Gentoo, I've similarly resisted grub2 for the past 5 years. I expect I'll switch to systemd sometime before 2020, but who knows.

Gentoo Resisting?

Posted Nov 29, 2014 19:59 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (4 responses)

Yup.

I've switched to grub2 (it's actually not that difficult!) but I had no choice. "legacy grub" doesn't like GPT, which is required for drives over 2TB, nor can it cope with raid afair.

Seeing as my main system now has two mirrored 3Tb drives, I didn't have much choice ... :-) (and when I can afford it, that will become 3 raid-5 drives).

Cheers,
Wol

Gentoo Resisting?

Posted Nov 30, 2014 1:59 UTC (Sun) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

does grub handle large numbers of drives yet? I've got one system with a 12 disk RAID drive and a couple other drives. Unfortunately, my boot disk shows up after the other drives (as sdn), and grub just cannot imagine that a drive that far out could be a boot drive and won't boot.

So I just stick with LILO

It's not fancy, but (as long as you keep in mind the need to not move your kernel image around), it gets the job done.

Gentoo Resisting?

Posted Nov 30, 2014 20:20 UTC (Sun) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

I don't actually know too much about grub's code, but my guess would be that the limitation came from the size of a static array, and grub2 is much more dynamic and may well have eliminated that, so it's probably worth investigating, at least.

Necessity of GPT for drives over 2 TB

Posted Nov 30, 2014 13:04 UTC (Sun) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link]

I've got a 4 TB drive here with an MBR partition table. I was also surprised to discover it didn't use GPT. I think it deals with the 2 TB limit by declaring a sector size of 4K, but I'm not entirely sure about all the details.

Also, I'm not trying to boot off this external USB 3 drive.

RAID boot with GRUB

Posted Nov 30, 2014 13:21 UTC (Sun) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link]

As for RAID, legacy GRUB can boot from RAID1, iff you install it into the MBR (of both drives), but it actively resists installation into the boot sector of the RAID1 device. That's why one of my production servers still uses LILO...