Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (661 mails)

[Josef Reidinger <jreidinger@xxxxxxx>]

Jiri Srain write:
> Dne úterý 08 Prosinec 2009 17:31:51 Josef Reidinger napsal(a):
> > Jeff Mahoney write:
> > > Hi everyone -
> > >
> > > Occasionally I take a break from kernel hacking. Recently, I was
> > > working on improving the reiserfs support in grub so that it doesn't
> > > take forever to load when there is a journal with outstanding
> > > transactions that need to be replayed.
> > >
> > > The thing is that the grub 0.97 code is truly awful. Every file system
> > > implementation has to implement strangely chosen primitives and,
> > > outside of the code itself, has 32k in memory which it has to manage
> > > itself and not exceed. This is the crux of the reiserfs /boot
> > > performance issue in bnc#538795.
> > >
> > > On top of that, the upstream grub developers refuse to accept fixes or
> > > features against 0.97, forcing distributors to carry patches around
> > >  forever.
> > >
> > > The good news is that GRUB2 lifts a whole lot of restrictions. It's
> > > modular in design, has a cleaner implementation, and has native support
> > > for more file systems. It supports LVM and MD RAID volumes. It supports
> > > DMRAID volumes (though I'm not sure how well here). The upstream
> > > development community is interested in maintaining it.
> > >
> > > The bad news is that it's a boot loader. There may be bugs lurking in
> > > there. That are tough to track down and leave you with an unbootable
> > >  system.
> > >
> > > So who wants to help test? :)
> > >
> > > -Jeff
> >
> > Hi, I looked at grub2 some time ago. I think that its main problem is
> > incredible magic configuration. Part of configuration is autodetected and
> >  part is written from simplified configuration file. Problem is that it
> >  doesn't support many case which we handle now (handle by perl-Bootloader
> >  and in the yast). It decreased possibility of boot setup (of course you
> >  can hack generated config file but it is not possible to read it
> >  automatic). Also as long as some configuration tweaks must be done via
> >  hacking scripts, it is not possible to parse it by yast.
> > So if you use grub2, then you must configurate it on your own. (when I
> > try Ubuntu with grub2 I found, that ubuntu does allow user almost none
> > options to setup on boot)
> > Josef
>
> The (autogenerated) configuration, as used e.g. in Ubuntu, is from my POV
> really too much magic and too little flexibility. On the other hand, it
>  should not prevent you from writing menu.lst (or grub.conf in the Ubuntu
>  file naming) manually and so install the Stage1 part.
>
> menu.lst looks semantically very similar to Grub1, OTOH the syntax is
> different.
>
> Jiri

I disagree. Its semantic is much richer. It support probing, searching and 
testing during boot. It can use variables, conditionals, loops and functions ( 
grub2 manual say itself, that it is similar to bash script ). I think that no 
one expect, that perl-Bootloader is can parse that configuration file (if it 
does correct it is halting problem). What is possible to do is parsing 
/etc/grub/default which is really simple.

BTW I cannot find command in grub to load 64-bit kernel, I see only 16-bit and 
32-bit one ( http://grub.enbug.org/CommandList )

Josef
-- 
Josef Reidinger
YaST team
maintainer of perl-Bootloader, YaST2-Repair, webyast 
(language,time,basesystem,ntp)
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