On Tue, Dec 08, 2009 at 11:42:36AM -0500, Jeff Mahoney wrote:
On 12/08/2009 11:24 AM, Greg KH wrote:
On Tue, Dec 08, 2009 at 11:15:17AM -0500, Jeff Mahoney wrote:
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? :)
What about using syslinux instead? That's what some distros are thinking of moving to instead of GRUB2 in the near future...
syslinux doesn't have anything remotely close to the feature set that GRUB2 has. AFAIK, it doesn't support anything beyond FAT, isofs, and ext[23] or support RAID or LVM.
Add btrfs support, and that's all you really need from a bootloader.
It works great for the purposes it was intended, but I don't think it really works that well as a flexible option.
grub2 might be considered "too" flexible :) have fun, greg k-h -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org