On Mon, 11 Aug 2014 13:32:08 -0400
Felix Miata
On 2014-08-11 15:13 (GMT+0200) Josef Reidinger composed:
Our goal for yast2-bootloader is to have tool that create working boot configuration for everyone ( everyone from technical side of view, for different storage configuration and different hardware, not to support all personal requirements ).
I don't see "working ... for everyone" as realistic as long as upstream policy remains in conflict with neutral MBR policy. Choosing to install to a partition with Grub2 as neutral MBR necessarily requires carries unavoidable frightening warnings that non-astute users should not have to ever be confronted by. Yast may be able to shield users from such warnings, but only when Yast is actually available at those all too frequent repair times that show up in support forums.
I think that we support almost all cases to not install to MBR if it is not needed. We use generic boot code and install to partition. Only exception is md raid, where even for raid1 we need to install to MBR. In other cases and even for xfs we allow install to PBR.
So I would like to ask if anyone have troubles with grub2, that grub2 cannot be used for his hardware or storage setup, so we can handle it before I did it.
I can't comprehensively answer that, because I refuse to use Grub2 on openSUSE installations. What I can say is those messages produced by Grub2 when vga= is included on cmdline and when installing Grub2 to a partition are themselves troubling just to have to see. As long as vga= does what it needs to do, no one should have to be warned about its deprecation on every boot.
It is deprecation warning, yast2-bootloader sets new option there instead of vga one.
The only installations here that have Grub2 installed are my few *buntus, all of which either get chainloaded to (producing ugly ttys and boot messages), or get booted via a(n openSUSE) Grub Legacy on a non-root/non-boot partition (with sometimes better tty results, depending on the actual installation configuration). All other distros that have no Grub Legacy installation option get installed sans bootloader. That's not a problem on my own systems, just a nuisance that already means fewer test installations of Factory will get done here.
Well, old grub have problems that it is no longer developed, so e.g. some new features like btrfs and booting its snapshots missing, so there is no option to focus only on grub1.
What it does mean is I have to seriously consider looking elsewhere for installations I do on others' computers. For the foreseeable post-13.1 support future that appears would be Mageia, which has already been my second choice distro for some time, and still last I checked by installing Cauldron defaults to Grub Legacy instead of Grub2.
It is your choice. Linux is about freedom to choose what fits your needs.
The radical differences between the two Grubs make it easy to understand the desire to divorce maintenance of them both under the same package umbrella. I can only wish there will be found a maintainer for a separated Grub Legacy Yast bootloader package.
Anyone can step up. He(she) just need to really work on it.
Long term, UEFI will replace BIOS booting. In that world, I don't see the complicated and less friendly relative monster that is the Grub2 some of us now know making better sense to keep in distro and sync'd to Yast for the few remaining functional BIOS systems than Grub Legacy.
I still see even for big disks, that some users use BIOS boot even with GPT for big disks. So we will see what is future of booting. I think BIOS booting is still not minor one.
Let it not remain unsaid that a substantial change like this ought to be made early as possible in a development cycle, not on the cusp of base system freeze. Now is a wrong time to do it, if it must be done at all.
Well, opensuse release cycle and milestones is not much clear for me, so it is hard to say when it is right time. I now see that some milestone was decided, so I would like to do it before this milestone. Josef -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org