Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (715 mails)

[Dennis Gallien <dwgallien@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thursday, March 08, 2012 12:02 AM Michael Chang wrote:
> Hi Dennis,
>
> I agree with your suggestions. To be host I love the idea to put
> boot.img to mbr and core.img to sectors following it (mbr hole),
> especially it was also suggested in manual.
>
> But things are not just vulnerability considerations. We had some
> discussions internally about this, we should have to consider
> different scenarios and setups .. overwriting mbr would mostly likely
> to cause some setup to fail (as we can't figure out what's current
> setup users have, then better not touch them). Also writing to mbr
> means that SUSE loaders takes control over the master boot code,  well
> we can chain load to other systems, but what if the chain load fail or
> even loader is broken? We don't support booting into others systems ..
> so let mbr do his job still .. :)
>
> I think mbr is a feasible propose to new or single OS environment,
> that is we don't need to consider multi-os booting and solid is the
> only concern. Also change to use gpt is a good idea for such booting
> scenario.
>
> PS. What we taking is about "proposed location", or default location
> would install. We can override it if we prefer others. :)

I agree that using the mbr is best if a new, single-OS install.  I understand 
the risk if there is already another setup on the machine, which is why I 
suggested that the installation first check those disk sectors.  I don't know 
if the grub2 install program does that (I doubt it) or if YaST is making that 
check before calling the grub install program (I doubt it) or if YaST *could* 
make that check to decide whether to use the mbr - and here I suggest that 
grub2 *should* provide at least that option (but probably will not) and that 
therefore it would be great if YaST could because *even if there is no OS 
installed* it is still possible those disk sectors were used for another 
proprietary purpose.  I strongly suspect that some hardware manufacturers are 
using that space for bios extensions and/or recovery image subsystems which 
are called from the bios, which we should not disturb without user permission.


<snip>

> yast2 bootloader have some facility to backup and restore mbr in
> grub1's setting page. Maybe we have to copy them to grub2. (noted)

I am aware of that capability, which is good.  The problem however is that 
there is a catch-22:  If the machine is unbootable to openSUSE because the 
grub install failed, then YaST is not available to restore the mbr.  To be 
honest, I don't recall whether YaST on Live-CD/DVD can do that.  IIRC it could 
do that on the install DVD when we had the recovery system, which is good now.  
Perhaps we should consider including just the boot loader recovery to the 
install DVD, because for new users this is our single largest vulnerability - 
having the openSUSE installation render the machine unbootable, we should IMO 
for Windows users have a way back to Windows if we bork their machine.

Thanks for your consideration.

--dg
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