On Wed, Mar 24, 2021 at 12:44:52PM +0800, Michael Chang via Grub-devel wrote: > On Tue, Mar 23, 2021 at 05:33:12PM +0100, Daniel Kiper wrote: > > On Mon, Mar 22, 2021 at 08:45:27PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote: > > [snip] > > > > rounds of security megapatches we've also seen that the amount of > > > divergence between upstream and various distributions in > > > security-critical code is in fact a serious problem that needs to be > > > addressed, and so I'm not happy about adding more to it for things that > > > touch e.g. the verifiers framework - obviously a security-critical > > > component. > > > > > > However, we probably won't have any choice. Bugs of the form "I > > > couldn't upgrade without reinstalling my entire system" are quite likely > > > to be considered critical by any distribution worth its salt, regardless > > > > How long are you going to support such systems? 1, 5 or 10 years? This > > approach makes GRUB upstream as a hostage of small MBR gaps users. > > Anyway, I think we have to make users aware that small MBR gaps are not > > supported any longer. Otherwise we will be playing whack-a-mole game > > which we will loose sooner or later. > > IMHO It is doing the right thing to declare MBR gap is not supported, it > is also doing the right thing to not breaking updates. We are yet to > seek out or arrive at right time to have short MBR gap completely out of > the game. Maybe a few years later nobody would care as the legacy pc > bios is diminishing, or at some point of time everyone here would agree > that we really have to blow up the limit in order to move on and convey > a clear message that people who is running short mbr gap won't receive > grub updates any longer unless they change it - given we have give > acceptable grace period for them to do the migration ...
After some thinking it seems to me we can do this. I can take "i386-pc: build verifiers API as module", "kern/misc: Move grub_printf_fmt_check to gfxmenu" and similar patches into 2.06. I will revert after the release all the patches which adds ifdefery or make code ugly and do not benefit other platforms than i386-pc. This way you will have support for small MBR gaps in 2.06 and I will have clean code after 2.06 release. Does it work for you guys? Daniel _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
