Re: [PATCH] Skip partitions during OS probing

[Axel Kellermann <axel.kellermann@gmx.de>]

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Turns out switching to UUIDs was very simple, grub already provides the
necessary utility function. :)

The new patch is attached.


Thanks,

Axel

On 07/11/2011 08:25 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 05:55:53PM +0200, Axel Kellermann wrote:
>>> Partition numbers tend to get moved around quite frequently, so this
>>> would be a fragile configuration, and require manual entry.  It would be
>> Good point. I guess the proposed solution works well with internal HDDs,
>> as they tend to always get the same device names during system
>> initialization (at least I never observed different behaviour on my
>> machine), but could be fragile for external drives.
> 
> I have observed it on internal drives.  If you have two controllers with
> different drivers and disks on both then there is no predicting which
> driver will load and initiallize first in some cases.  Switching to UUIDs
> made the box much more reliable to boot (it was a 50/50 chance it would
> boot with the disks in the "right" order and work).
> 
>>> better to automatically notice that the partition is a Win7 system
>> I agree. But I guess on my machine it is not really grubs fault that the
>> Win7 system partition is marked as bootable. I only have one of those
>> Win7 licenses that come with recovery media, so I'm not able to do a
>> manual, clean install and it seems the recovery installation always
>> makes the system partition bootable. I'm probably not the only one
>> experiencing this kind of faulty setup...
>>
>>> partition, and ignore it.  If you must explicitly exclude manually
>>> chosen partitions, they should be specified by UUID.
>> I guess we could work with UUIDs instead of partition names, but it also
>> turns this little patch into something a bit more complicated. I'd be
>> happy to look into it, but we should first decide if we really cover a
>> use-case here or if the whole thing isn't worth the effort.

[-- Attachment #2: skip_partitions_uuid.patch --]
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=== modified file 'util/grub-mkconfig.in'
--- old/util/grub-mkconfig.in	2011-07-07 21:52:58 +0000
+++ new/util/grub-mkconfig.in	2011-07-09 21:08:25 +0000
@@ -257,7 +257,8 @@
   GRUB_INIT_TUNE \
   GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT \
   GRUB_ENABLE_CRYPTODISK \
-  GRUB_BADRAM
+  GRUB_BADRAM \
+  GRUB_SKIP_PARTITIONS
 
 if test "x${grub_cfg}" != "x"; then
   rm -f ${grub_cfg}.new

=== modified file 'util/grub.d/30_os-prober.in'
--- old/util/grub.d/30_os-prober.in	2011-07-02 19:22:19 +0000
+++ new/util/grub.d/30_os-prober.in	2011-07-11 20:13:04 +0000
@@ -94,6 +94,12 @@
   LONGNAME="`echo ${OS} | cut -d ':' -f 2 | tr '^' ' '`"
   LABEL="`echo ${OS} | cut -d ':' -f 3 | tr '^' ' '`"
   BOOT="`echo ${OS} | cut -d ':' -f 4`"
+  UUID="`grub-probe --target=fs_uuid --device ${DEVICE}`"
+
+  if [ "x${GRUB_SKIP_PARTITIONS}" != "x" -a "x`echo ${GRUB_SKIP_PARTITIONS} | grep -i -e '\b'${UUID}'\b'`" != "x" ] ; then
+    echo "Skipped ${LONGNAME} on ${DEVICE} by user request." >&2
+    continue
+  fi
 
   if [ -z "${LONGNAME}" ] ; then
     LONGNAME="${LABEL}"