Re: [PATCH v2] i386-pc: build verifiers API as module

[lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca (Lennart Sorensen)]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2021 at 05:33:12PM +0100, Daniel Kiper wrote:
> How long are you going to support such systems? 1, 5 or 10 years? This
> approach makes GRUB upstream as a hostage of small MBR gaps users.
> Anyway, I think we have to make users aware that small MBR gaps are not
> supported any longer. Otherwise we will be playing whack-a-mole game
> which we will loose sooner or later.

I was surprised to find a 63 sector gap on one of my systems recently
when upgrading the root disk to a larger drive (by cloning the old disk
and then resizing with gparted).  I decided being that this was an SSD
it was in my interest to change it to 1MB alignment while doing the
resizing anyhow.  I guess this install has been around for a while from
before Debian changed to using 1MB alignment by default.  So some such
systems apparently are still around.

Perhaps you need to actually have grub generate a warning when installed
in a 63 sector gap for a while (where a while preferaby is more than one
release cycle for common distributions, so hence more than 2 or 3 years)
so that people get told there will be a problem with upgrades at some
point and they should look into fixing their partitioning now.

Ideally to make people know about it, put the warning on the boot screen,
not just when doing grub install.  Make people aware so they can start
to look into what they need to do to change their system.  Finding out
after they can't boot is too late.

-- 
Len Sorensen