On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 11:20:23AM -0500, Bruce Dubbs wrote: > My position is that we should stay with grup 0.97 and the compatible > version of e2fsprogs until upstream gets the problems worked out.
That works great for booting LFS, but an LFS-installed grub won't be able to boot the host's kernel if that kernel is on a filesystem that grub can't read. (Moving on to the general issue now...) The real problem at this point (IMO of course) is that grub contains an FS driver of its own, for each FS, and grub updates so infrequently (if at all). If there was any hope of a new 0.98 version (with this patch included) soon, we could simply upgrade it at that point, but who knows how long it's going to take to get that out. (And of course, no new features will be accepted into grub ever, so if the grub people start to think that this is a new feature instead of a bugfix, it may never get released.) Since that's the problem, we could move in one of two directions to fix it: either stop using any filesystem driver in the bootloader (which means, at this point, "move to LILO"), or fix the ext2/3 driver in grub (with the patch). I don't think that the patch is that huge of a problem, myself. I'd certainly rather patch grub (for a while: until we get a new release, assuming that will actually happen) than have to deal with rerunning lilo every time I do anything with the kernel image. And then having to remember that I can't move the starting block of bzImage anymore either. (So /sbin/installkernel doesn't fix all of lilo's issues. It does help a lot, *if* you don't mind hiding the kernel installation procedure even more than it already is hidden, but it's not perfect.) Now yes, the same issues apply to grub's stage1 and stage1_5 files (and stage2 if no stage1_5 file is in use), but those get installed once and never change. I recompile the same kernel with different options built in (and overwrite its bzImage-<version> file in /boot) from time to time; using an /sbin/installkernel script might help me with remembering to rerun lilo, but then modules_install target in the kernel will also be run, which will delete my module tree as well. And this will force me to reinstall nvidia and kqemu; today, I can simply overwrite bzImage and reboot. On the other hand, I can simply continue using grub and use the patch (i.e. deviate from the book), too. That's not great, but if the book moves to LILO, it will work.
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