Feature changed by: Andreas Jaeger (a_jaeger) Feature #308497, revision 21 Title: Update to GRUB v2 openSUSE-11.3: Evaluation Priority Requester: Important Info Provider: Jakub Rusinek (liviopl) Requested by: Jeff Mahoney (jeff_mahoney) Partner organization: openSUSE.org Description: Every single bug or feature that anyone has developed for GRUB 0.97 has been rejected by the upstream project in favor of using GRUB 2. There has been resisitence in the distribution community to switching boot loaders, but this stalemate isn't going to go away. The code itself isn't well written or well maintained. Adding a new feature involves jumping through a lot of hoops that may or may not work even if you manage to work around all the runtime limitations. For example, a fs implementation has a static buffer it can use for memory management. It's only 32k. For complex file systems, or even a simple journaled file system, we run into problems (like the reiserfs taking forever to load bug) because we don't have enough memory to do block mapping for the journal so it needs to scan it for every metadata read. (Yeah, really.) GRUB v2 has a cleaner design, is modular, and it has support for multiple architectures including i386, x86-64, and powerpc. Support for ia64 is said to be forthcoming. EFI support is already there. More importantly, it supports far more file systems and has native MD RAID and LVM support. Adding support for a new file system is much easier, cleaner, and has fewer limitations than with GRUB 0.97. Business case (Partner benefit): openSUSE.org: * Supportability - upstream bug fixes and development community * Features - better fs support, native RAID and LVM support Discussion: #1: Robert Davies (robopensuse) (2009-12-12 14:11:06) The main issue with GRUB2 (trying it out with Kubuntu-9.10) seems that the simple text config file "/boot/grub/menu.list" is replaced by scripts in /etc/grub.d, so GRUB menu configuration is less obvious and more auto-magical. Changing order of entries, and customising the menu becomes indirect, though it would appear possible to "simply" use the 40_custom script and disable the other scripts, which handle entries for updated kernels. Altering kernel options is done in similar way to /etc/sysconfig files which allow setting of variables. YaST Bootloader module would need reworking to be focussed on option tweaks and listing installed kernels, and other OS's found. #2: Michael Löffler (michl19) (2010-02-10 18:30:51) Would we have a maintainer for GRUB2? #3: Jakub Rusinek (liviopl) (2010-02-10 19:22:36) Better appearance, localization... It's worth it. #6: Stephan Kulow (coolo) (2010-03-03 12:54:43) (reply to #3) are you willing to (co-)maintain it? #7: Jakub Rusinek (liviopl) (2010-03-03 13:54:08) (reply to #6) What do you mean exactly? That I could be in charge of packaging it? This is something I could do. Then it's easy to try using SUSE Studio :) . + #8: Andreas Jaeger (a_jaeger) (2010-03-03 14:05:44) (reply to #7) + I think Stephan points to + http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2010-02/msg00186.html -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/308497