Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1483 mails)

[Hans Witvliet <suse@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2012-02-13 at 02:10 -0500, Felix Miata wrote:
> On 2012/02/13 16:47 (GMT+1100) Basil Chupin composed:
>
> > Sven Burmeister wrote:
>
> > >  AFAIK because openSUSE does not use GRUB2.
>
> > I ask this question with great trepidation and much quick-beating of the
> > heart: why should openSUSE's Grub not see any systems using Grub2?
>
> openSUSE's Grub isn't what puts stanzas from menu.lsts it finds during 
> installation into the new openSUSE menu.lst it creates. YaST and/or 
> perl-Bootloader or whatever combination of tools responsible for it all will 
> have to be trained to parse Grub2's menu.cfg files and extract the info to 
> build Legacy Grub stanzas from. That will require both the knowledge and 
> available time investment to make happen, something I don't expect to see 
> before such time as openSUSE devs choose to implement Grub2 fully.
>
> In the mean time, possibly someone could implement some minimal recognition 
> in order to include simple chainloader entries to partitions found to have 
> Grub2 installed. The problem with that is foreign distros almost always put 
> the bootloader on the MBR, which openSUSE installation again won't be able to 
> cope with until a full implementation is made, so only some foreign distros 
> would ever make into menu.lst entries even via chainloader stanzas.
>
> I too don't like Grub2, which I feel is in many ways overkill, excessively 
> demanding and complicated, besides being very foreign compared to Legacy 
> Grub. openSUSE might be better off never adopting Grub2, possibly making use 
> of AiR-Boot or something else in order to overcome Legacy Grub's limitations 
> WRT RAID, GPT and whatever else the future will demand openSUSE better 
> support.
> -- 

Not a lot of people are fond of changing things that are considered to
be black-sorcery (hence people stay with grub-legacy).
And it is not only John Doe who is not pleased with grub2:
Quoting Alan Cox (other list): "Grub2 is not the future. Grub2 is an
unfortunatele accident on the way.

However, it seems (!) grub2 can deliver some long anticipated goods:
1) btrfs for /boot
2) recognizeing disks/raids larger that 2TB. (might be urban legand)
3) encrypted /boot (wonder how..)

However there seems to be many pittfals:
- yast being able (yet) to create grub2-config files
- not being able to upgrade from grub1 to grub2
(it seems that grub1 is content with an additional space of 63 sectors,
while grub2 demands atleast 2048 secors). Which might not be a problem
for fresh install, but could be for upgrading older systems.


hw

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