On 31.12.2011 09:36, Jake Thomas wrote:
Thank you Vladmir for the response : D ! I'm new to the Grub mailing lists, and
these bugs have been on my mind for some while.
My experiences differ with a couple things you said. You said that you cannot depend on
drive order. One of the few things that has worked 100% of the time with my adventures in
Grub has been Grub calling the hard drive (by "hard drive" I include thumb
drives) it is on the first hard drive. In all my experiences, regardless of machine and
regardless of whether using EFI or BIOS, the hard drive with Grub on it is recognized by
Grub as the first hard disk. That's the one thing I can count on.
Not true. While some implementations have this behaviour it's not
specified or universal
What if the UUID changes?
Then you need to update grub.cfg
What if I have more than one thing with the same UUID?
Then you're just asking for trouble on several levels. Ranging from
GRUB, going through initramfs, fstab and some FS drivers themselves
(e.g. btrfs can't work in such conditions)
In the bug I describe where Grub boots the internal instead of the thumb
drive, Grub is disobeying my instruction from the grub.cfg file to boot (hd0,
[whatever]). hd0 is my thumb drive. I have confirmed this with ls (list) at the
Grub command line. Listing the contents of a partition in hd0 shows contents of
my thumb drive, not the internal hard drive. Then it boots the internal instead
anyways, even though I said to boot hd0, which I just confirmed is my thumb
drive and not the internal.
how initramfs finds root is outside of GRUB's scope and I suppose that's
where your problem is. I guess GRUB loaded kernel and initrd from stick
but it mounted the internal root. Again duplicated UUIDs=trouble and
isn't supported by anyone.
Ok, I messed up on technical terminology with the "carriage return." I meant whatever it is you get from
pressing the "enter" key while in a text editor. That is, vertical space. If there is any vertical space
after the last "}" from the last menu entry, grub doesn't load that config file. You would have to go back in
and delete the vertical space at the bottom so that the "}" is the very last line. Not just the last visible
line, the last line period. You can check by using the arrow keys to try and go down to the next line. If you get to a
blank line, you need to delete that vertical space. If the cursor doesn't move, you're good.
Unable to reproduce. Check that you have latest version and that you use
unix endline style, not dos/windows or mac one
Why shouldn't the normal mod be baked into the image? Isn't it vial for it to be baked
into the image? How else is it going to come up with a background image and menu entries
and not be in rescue mode? I want it to go to the menu automatically. I don't want to
have to type "insmod normal". Especially if I am forging a multi-bootable thumb
drive for someone who is not a Grub guru.
insmod normal is issued automatically. Use grub-install or grub-mkstandalone
With my grub.cfg file for 64-bit EFI, even when I didn't change anything in the
file at all, behavior of Grub was not consistent across all boots, and all the
while the drive mapping stayed the same; hd0 was always the thumb drive. So I
know the bug is either in the EFI or in Grub. Not my grub.cfg. It usually
works. And I am loading a unicode font file.
Upgrade to the latest version for starters
New Year's is getting close, maybe already is in some places around the world.
Not here. Cooking is still to be done. Will be unavailable for few days.
Cheers,
Jake
Sent from my iPhone
On Dec 30, 2011, at 8:54 AM, Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder'
Serbinenko<phco...@gmail.com> wrote:
On 30.12.2011 14:12, Jake Thomas wrote:
//Using version 1.99 of Grub
Hello everyone, I've been meaning to submit these bugs for quite a while now,
at least since summer, but have been busy with school and hadn't taken the time
to figure the Grub mailing list out, and was at a loss as to how to go about
submitting bugs.
I have been playing with Grub2 on a thumb drive. I didn't know why it wasn't
booting on the Mac, and, after some research, found out about EFI v.s. BIOS.
After some more research and head-banging, I made some working grub efi images,
put them on my thumb drive, and I could boot Linux off my thumb drive on a Mac,
which uses EFI, not BIOS.
I encountered some issues.
One I call the "temptation error". If Linux is on the internal hard drive of my
Macbook, and I get booted into Grub off my thumb drive via EFI, and I tell it to load
Linux off the thumb drive, Grub finds the Linux on the internal hard drive too tempting
and usually boots that instead. The kernel and initrd were the same name and path on both
the internal hard drive and thumb drive, so it's not like it got possessed and started
looking around for Linuxes to boot.
When you are on a Macbook with Linux on the internal hard drive with a kernel
and initrd of the same name and path as the kernel and initrd on a thumb drive
with a bootable grub EFI image, and you boot into EFI Grub off the thumb drive,
it seems to, on average, actually succeed in booting off the thumb drive rather
than the internal about 1 in every 14 times. It's more like it randomly picks a
number between 12 and 17 or so, and that's how many more attempts it will take
to get to the next successful attempt to boot off the thumb drive rather than
the internal.
It's usually a symptom of duplicate UUID or wrong grub.cfg. You can't rely on
drive order. You need to use search -s root -u UUID
Another one is an often patternistic blackout bug. I can boot my MacBook off my
thumb drive into EFI Grub, select to boot Linux off my thumb drive, and boot
Linux no problem (unless Linux exists on the internal). Then the next time I
try, it might black the screen out. In fact, pressing enter or escape or any
key doesn't do anything, so it actually is crashed-out, rather than the screen
simply having gone black.
But here's the interesting part: If I save a copy of grub.cfg to my desktop (the one in
the EFI grub prefix) and then delete it off my thumb drive, and then boot my MacBook off
my thumb drive, I successfully get to a command line and can boot Linux "by
hand." Then I can put the grub.cfg back on, and it will work next time. Sometimes it
follows a simple AB pattern of blacking out, me deleting grub.cfg, getting to a command
line, me putting grub.cfg back on, Grub booting correctly with a menu and background
image and all, and then the cycle repeats. Though recently I haven't experienced a strict
cycle; it's more of a certain probability of blacking out, to which the fix is to delete
grub.cfg, boot without it, then put it back on.
It's possible that it's another symptom of last problem
And here's a couple of minor bugs (but they still ought to be fixed):
Grub doesn't load a grub.cfg file if it has extra carriage returns at the end. To someone
who doesn't know this and is making a grub.cfg file by hand for, say, a thumb drive, this
can cause a lot of frustration; it sure caused me a lot of frustration! Grub only loads a
grub.cfg file if the last character is a part of the Grub script, usually a "}".
grub.cfg has to be in unix-style newline that is \n=LF. There should be no
CR=carriage return at all.
When I boot my thumb drive via EFI on my MacBook, it erroneously, for a brief moment,
says "error: prefix not set" and then continues loading Grub to a menu with a
background and everything (unless it blacks out). The prefix is indeed set and can be
confirmed by command line.
normal mod shouldn't be baked into image. Use grub-install
Also, I have experienced issues with iMacs, but don't have enough definite
testing to really report anything. It wasn't loading the background, had funny
characters around the menu like it does when the font file isn't present, and
it was in portrait rather than in landscape, and if I remember right, didn't
even boot Linux.
if you use gfxterm you need to load unifont. If you don't GRUB can't load
background image
I'm a big fan of Grub. I felt like I found heaven on Earth when I started
understanding it and using it, because I was using syslinux before that (for
thumb drives). Boy! Support for either EFI or BIOS, the ability to have a
pretty background image, font of your choice, so many modules for
anything...it's got so many great things to it! And if these kinks could be
worked out, it'd be even better. If we really do switch to EFI, they better get
fixed.
That's good to hear. You can drop by in IRC and hopefully we can figure what's
wrong with your system and whether any of it is a bug as opposed to wrong
manual config
Cheers,
Jake
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Regards
Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko
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Regards
Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko
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