On 01/09/2014 10:03 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Thu, 2014-01-09 at 15:36 -0500, Gene Czarcinski wrote:
OK, here are some additional thoughts/considerations ...
1. What this does for grub2 also applies to when syslinux/extlinux is
the bootloader. There are some situations when it is desireable to have
anaconda do all the configuration it now does but not do the extlinux
--install or install a new MBR or change the active/bootable flag on the
partition.
Yeah, whether to look at the behaviour for other bootloaders is an
obvious consideration, but BIOS/grub2 is still by far the most important
case.
Currently, Fedora has syslinux-4.05 but current upstream is
syslinux-6.02 and 6.02 adds xfs support to extlinux as well as the
beginnings of efi64 and efi32 support. I would not write it off just yet.
2. There may be a need for a new kickstart command which specifies a
directory where the /boot files would be installed (kernel, initramfs,
syslinux/extlinux, etc.). In a regular gui install, this directory
could default to using the machine-id with the result that everything
for this install goes into /boot/<machine-id>/ rather than /boot. Yes,
this can be done with a complicated post-install script or after install
process but it would be a lot easier if there were some enabling
capabilities.
This isn't something I want to consider as part of the current proposal.
I think it would be better considered separately.
Just mentioning it. I agree that this is a separate issue but one which
may be fast approaching. There seems to be some effort being put into
the bootloader stuff in systemd ... a prime motivator in the effort is a
Red Hat employee. I doubt that he would be pushing it if it was not
seen as the future. Don't get me wrong, I thing the choice of vfat is
foolish at best and putting all boot-related files for all installed
systems into a single vfat partition is looking for trouble ... but, I
figure that it will either work well of be abandon.
3. There appears to be a lot of effort going into support of UEFI and
currently grub2 is the bootloader because it alone supported EFI. That
is no longer the case since syslinux-6.02 supports the "old" bios as
well as efi64 and efi32.
Also off topic from the current proposal, and pjones has said grub2 is
used as the UEFI bootloader not because it's the 'only' one - there have
always been others, including elilo and gummiboot - but because it's the
only one with all the capabilities considered necessary.
Indeed, and grub2 would have even more capabilities under Fedora if it
was updated to current upstream (check my bugzilla reports on grub2 and
os-prober).
Given the above updates, grub2 will support multi-devide BTRFS volumes,
/boot as a subvolume on BTRFS, and /boot as a directory under a rootfs
subvolume.
And, of course, grubby needs to be updated too (the bigger job). I
still believe that using grub2-mkconfig to do the updating is a better
approach. For user's that want/need something more there is
/etc/grub.d/30_os-prober, /etc/grub.d/40_custom, and
/etc/grub.d/41_custom. There is simply no need to dorque with grub.cfg
and certainly no need to preserve anything in the current grub.cfg. [I
am one of those who want/need something more out of grub2 and use
40_custom very effectively.]
Gene
_______________________________________________
Anaconda-devel-list mailing list
Anaconda-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/anaconda-devel-list
