On 11/27/2013 10:44 AM, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 07:24:20AM -0500, Gene Czarcinski wrote:
I am not sure when this started happening, but with "recent" Fedora
releases for systems with grub2 bootloaders, an additional "rescue"
kernel has been provided. This "rescue" kernel is never updated but
remains the same as that provided by anaconda. I assume that it is
the kernel that was available at install time. I also assume that
the purpose of the "rescue" kernel is to provide a backup capability
just in case the updating of kernels has managed to create an
unbootable system.
The question: If this is a good option for grub2 based systems, why
isn't a good options to have for systems with extlinux bootloaders
too?
It's a fine option, but the feature to add extlinux support was done just to
support building cloud images, where the rescue image can't be selected and
is therefore just deadweight, so that wasn't added. That doesn't mean the
feature couldn't be further extended to be more generally useful, but no one
is signed up for the work. If you want to do it, I'll help test.
If you add this image to the extlinux.conf file by hand, of course, it
will work as expected.
So, the only reason that extlinux was added was for cloud support and
the rescue kernel would not be of use there. I suspect that most
(almost all) folks prefer the flexibility and general functionality of
grub2 although there is grumbling now and then about it being complex
and hard to understand let alone get it to do something specific.
From that perspective, extlinux does offer a significant advantage: it
is plain simple (or can be anyway). This might be attractive to a
not-insignificant portion of the Fedora users if it was explained and
demonstrated to them.
I also noticed that debian has an extlinux-update script which manages
to complexity things like grub2-mkconfig does. It uses os-prober in a
manner similar to the way grub2 does to find other installed/bootable
systems so that entries can be added for them.
I am not sure how much, if any, effort should be expended in improving
extlinux capabilities.
Having said that, a question Matt since you seem to be much more
familiar with extlinux (an I assume syslinux also): does
extlinux/syslinux currently have the functionality to replace grub2?
Does it support EFI?
Gene
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