Re: GRUB and the risk of block list corruption in extX

[Chris Murphy <lists@colorremedies.com>]

On Feb 8, 2013, at 10:17 AM, Martin Wilck <martin.wilck@ts.fujitsu.com> wrote:

>> This is not a complete answer but one of my problems is that such
>> requests don't even suply any kind of reason to go into such installs.
>> We nerd to consider usecases before even considering using an approach
>> which is known for some pretty serious problems. Will answer in more
>> details later.
> 
> In my case, the reason is a multiboot setup based on chainloading the
> indiviual installed OS's bootloaders from a central, primary bootloader.


Why do you specifically want a blocklist method of getting the primary bootloader to load the second? What is your primary bootloader and version? The only reason I can think of that you would need a blocklist, is if your primary bootloader is so old that it doesn't understand the file system the 2nd bootloader is installed on. In the case of Fedora 18, default is /boot on it's own partition, on ext4; so if your primary bootloader understands ext4, it doesn't need a blocklist to load GRUB2. It can directly find and load /boot/grub2/i-386-pc/core.img.

If the primary boot loader is GRUB2, it's capable of reading many file systems, and then finding a distribution specific grub configuration file and consuming it. Even legacy formats.


> Recent GRUB2-based distributions like Fedora have removed this option,
> and some users are dissatisfied with that. 

If the enhancement in bug 886502 were to happen, would this enable your primary boot loader to find either Fedora's grub.cfg, or core.img instead of depending on a blocklist?

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=886502

Chris Murphy