On Saturday 20 October 2007, Karl Larsen wrote:
>Gene Heskett wrote:
>> On Friday 19 October 2007, Karl Larsen wrote:
>>> I have put the new part of my overall grub writing on this list and
>>> got complete quiet from the group. I ask you to read it again. The
>>> definition of a root directory has been tested and it is right.
>>
>> Frankly, I tried to read it, and never saw such a miss-understood writing,
>> so much so that I didn't feel it was worth a reply, and I doubt that
>> anyone else did either. I would not contaminate my thinking with that.
>
> I gather from your in-ability to read the paper is because you think
>it is complete crap? I would like to know what you think is wrong with it.
>
>>> So onward and up. I want to write down exactly how you start one
>>> grub with another. It is doable but the stuff in info grub is not
>>> correct! I will prove that soon.
>>
>> Prove it all you want, but please do it to yourself. The rest of us are
>> welcome to ignore you, and will. Until you have a basic understanding of
>> what grub is doing, please don't confuse the issue. Newbies to this list
>> have no way of filtering your spew of miss-information, making it doubly
>> harder for them to 'get it right'.
>
> Your concern for the new people is touching. I do not see how what I
>wrote can hurt the new people. I doubt they will understand it. Maybe
>that is your problem?
>
I am hardly a newbie, making the jump from an amiga to linux without ever
owning a windows box back in 1998. I also suspect I have 40+ years on you in
the birthday count.
And I have, if you'll check the archives back when RH7-8-9 was new, instructed
many people on the finer points of grubs use, or miss-use, of the 'root'
keyword. I personally think its first usage is the erroneous one, and that
it would have been a hell of a lot less confusing to the newbie if that usage
had been called 'boot' rather than 'root', because that usage actually
defines the drive and partition number on that drive where grub can find its
stage two files and the kernel and initrd to use when completing the loading
stage, and before you see the line "uncompressing the kernel".
That is this line in a verse of grub.conf:
root (hd0,0)
which defines that its the drive normally set for master on the IDE0 cable,
the one on the end of the cable, thats the hd0 portion, and its the first
partition on that drive, which is the second 0 since all this crap runs on a
base zero numbering system. It could just as easily say root (hd3,2) to
indicate that it would be 3rd partition in, of the drive set as slave on the
IDE1 cable, that is just as valid. I haven't tried it set for an 'extended'
partition, and I'd assume it would take a smarter than the average bear bios
to handle that.
This is the usage that I would have changed, were I the one who wrote grub,
from root to boot, because it actually tells grub where its boot files are.
Its second usage, the argument in the kernel string, tells the kernel, in very
similar drive & partition syntax, where the partition to be mounted as '/'
is.
That is this line in a given grub verse:
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.23 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb
And this could just as easily say root=/dev/hda7 since by this time, the
kernel is initializing and knows about extended partitions by then. This to
me is the correct usage of the word 'root' because it truly is the root of
all the filesystems mounted.
But I didn't write grub, so we're stuck with the double usage of 'root' and
the confusion factor it creates for newbies.
AIUI, grub, if not dealing with a LVM system, can function without a /boot
partition, in which case the above syntax must be modified, and the grub
installer does this, to gave a full path like this:
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.23 ro root=/dev/hda1
(a base 1 numbering scheme is used here, furthering the newbie confusion
quotient, that is equ to (hd0,0) in the other syntax)
assuming the /boot directory is in fact available in the drive & partition
specified by the first usage above, but its not an optional setup I've ever
used and I go back to RH5.0.
Compared to lilo, grub is the handy invention similar to sliced bread or
bottled beer. Where lilo is a one trick pony, grub apparently hasn't a
native limit in how many verses of boot setups you maintain in a
given '/boot' partition as I have had, by simply not deleting the older ones
until a 500 meg /boot partition ran out of room, as high as 28 different
kernels, all capable of being booted should I so desire.
I do not run a distro kernel other than very occasionally as a check to see if
that ones broken too basis, currently running 2.6.23 (no sata drives here, so
I haven't built the .1 patch) and waiting for 2.6.24-rc1, which when it
appears will be built and booted here, usually within 24 hours of the
announcement. I look at myself as somewhat resembling the canary in the coal
mine in my limited contribution to this thing called linux.
Now, I suspect that you'll probably argue with me, but it will be a one sided
argument since I tend not to argue about points I know about after having
stated them once. You can learn, or not. So far you've argued with 95% of
the good advice you've been given which does not a good impression make.
You may find it interesting that because of your rants about selinux, I
re-enabled it here, in permissive mode so far, which took about 4 or 5
reboots in order to get everything in a row, but its working just fine now,
and is not now getting in the way of anything I've wanted to do, generating a
quite verbose /var/log/audit/audit.log while doing it, mostly about cron
jobs, one of which runs every 5 minutes to regenerate my sig with a new
fortune cookie. The keyword 'deny' has not appeared in that file, nor has it
appeared in /var/log/messages since I re-enabled it last Monday.
Selinux gave me a whole litter of full grown & very hungry lioness's initially
and got disabled, but I have to admit that once the system was working, it
seems that the updates have fixed it, or that its a hell of a lot easier to
get the system setup like one likes it, and then re-apply selinux, than all
the propaganda we've been subjected to about that procedure being a path full
of rattlesnakes. It hasn't happened here. And all I did was follow the
directions given...
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Mal: "Send word to Patience?"
Wash: "Haven't heard back yet. Didn't she shoot you one time?"
Mal: "Everyone's making a fuss."
--Episode #1, "Serenity"
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