Hi all, The version of update-grub in Debian's grub-legacy packages[0] has an interesting feature where it attempts to detect when I kernel is compiled for Xen and chooses to include it in the menu depending on whether it is running inside a Xen guest domain or not[1].
As described at [2] this behaviour has been broken by the latest kernels which due to the paravirt_ops (CONFIG_PARAVIRT) framework which means that these kernels are now bootable both native and as a Xen guest domain. Robert asked me to bring the issue here and to ask the question of whether or not this behaviour would be welcomed as a patch to grub 2. Personally I am not a fan of this behaviour since it causes the wrong thing to occur in several circumstances, i.e. installing into a chroot or switching back and forth between fully- and para-virtualised operation and as time moves on CONFIG_PARAVIRT will become the norm and the behaviour less necessary in general. What is the opinion of the grub 2 devs? Cheers, Ian. [0] For those not familiar with Xen the classical Xen kernels cannot be run on bare metal so there is an argument that it makes little sense to include them in the menu for the control domain, conversely including a native kernel in the menu for a guest domain is not terribly useful either. CONFIG_PARAVIRT (2.6.22+) changes this and such kernel is now bootable on native and under Xen. [1] http://svn.debian.org/viewsvn/pkg-grub/grub/trunk/debian/update-grub?view=auto [2] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grub-devel/2008-April/004701.html http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grub-devel/2008-May/004821.html -- Ian Campbell Waste not fresh tears over old griefs. -- Euripides
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