On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 7:35 AM, Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwa...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 2011-10-04, Neil Bothwick <n...@digimed.co.uk> wrote: >> On Tue, 04 Oct 2011 04:49:56 -0500, Dale wrote: >> >>> Subject line says it pretty well. Is grub2 stable, who uses it and can >>> you post your experience on the switching process? Was it difficult? >> >> I use it on my netbook, which I admittedly don't boot more than a couple >> of times a month. It's stable, I can't comment on the switching process >> as I used GRUB2 from the start with this machine, it seemed a good time >> to get to grips with it. >> >> GRUB2 is neither complicated nor difficult, but it is different. > > I've only used it on Ubuntu, and maybe it's just Ubuntu's > implementation -- but it was both complicated and difficult. There > are 10X as many files, and to change anything you edit a whole set of > configuration files and run a utility that generates _another_ set of > configuration files. > > Compared to "vi /boot/grub/menu.lst; reboot", that's complicated. > >> If you try to think in terms of legacy GRUB, you will have more >> problems than if you approach is as learning a new system. > > At first glace, grub2 looks like a minature Unix installation whose > purpose is to boot a bigger Unix installation. It's got it's own init > system and it's own set of init scripts.
That it's not true. It connects to whatever init system do you have (OpenRC, SysV, systemd, Upstart), and it has scripts to *generate* the config file. The thing is that GRUB2 needs to understand several filesystems to grab the kernel image from. It also wants to be able to use a more interesting resolution than 640x480. This means that it has to reimplement all the code for any filesystem, and all the code for video handling. The scripts are for semi automatic generation of the config file, which is more complicated than the one from grub-legacy. On the other hand, you only need to configure once, and run it every time you compile and put a new kernel in /boot. But if you just change your current kernel (same image file), you don't have to do anything. Note that the version is 1.99, not 2.0. It is not finished: when 2.0 is reached, hopefully you will be able to disableat ./configure time what video drivers and filesystems do you want to use. Also, the scripts to generate the config file will be standardized by then. However, in the last LPC, it was suggested that replicating filesystem and video code on the kernel and grub was a terrible idea, and some developers have suggested to use a /firstboot partition with a simple filesystem, and populated with a kernel image and an initramfs. That will mean that to boot Linux, we would use Linux. You can read an article about it here: http://lwn.net/Articles/458789/ It was only a proposal: I don't know what will be the standard in the future. Regards. -- Canek Peláez Valdés Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
