Hello, this is a question about the long-running topic of installing GRUB in partitions or partitionless disks.
Recently I have been involved in discussions about this on https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=872826. The Fedora boot loader can't be installed in partition headers any more. The major reason given by the Fedora developers is the famous GRUB warning "blocklists are UNRELIABLE and their use is discouraged." The Grub manual says "installing to a filesystem means that GRUB is vulnerable to its blocks being moved around by filesystem features such as tail packing, or even by aggressive fsck implementations". I'd like to understand how this blocklist corruption might come to pass (except for cases where "core.img" itself is moved, deleted, or overwritten by user space tools). Also, it has been recommended to prevent accidental corruption by setting the IMMUTABLE flag on core.img, and I'd like to ask for the GRUB experts' opinion about that. Finally I'd like to know if it's true that the GRUB team plans to drop block list support altogether in a future version. Regards Martin Wilck PS: It has been stated that of recent filesystems, this matters most for extX, because btrfs has a 64k header where embedding GRUB is usually possible. Therefore I asked a similar question on ext4-devel. -- Dr. Martin Wilck PRIMERGY System Software Engineer x86 Server Engineering FUJITSU Fujitsu Technology Solutions GmbH Heinz-Nixdorf-Ring 1 33106 Paderborn, Germany Phone: ++49 5251 525 2796 Fax: ++49 5251 525 2820 Email: martin.wi...@ts.fujitsu.com Internet: http://ts.fujitsu.com Company Details: http://ts.fujitsu.com/imprint _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
