[aklug] Re: Friday night Linux

On Sun, 9 Jan 2011, Arthur Corliss wrote:

<snip>

Just found this on Grub2:

   http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-grub2/index.html?ca=drs-

A snippet of that article:

   GRUB 2's improvements

   For Linux-only systems, GRUB Legacy handles the boot loader job
   perfectly well. The reason for the transition has partly to do with boot
   loader development. GRUB Legacy contains code that the developers consider
   messy and unmaintainable. To add new features, they chose to rewrite the
   boot loader from scratch rather than build on such a base. As a practical
   matter to systems administrators, GRUB 2 supports several features that
   are important now or that may become important in the future:

     * Platform support. GRUB Legacy works on x86 and x86-64 systems only.
       GRUB 2 is intended to work across a wider range of architectures,
       although documentation on using it on anything but x86 or x86-64 is
       scant. It does work on PowerPC? and Scalable Process Architecture
       (SPARC) systems, though.
     * Firmware support. GRUB 2 supports additional firmware types, including
       BIOS, EFI, and OpenFirmware. As with support for unusual CPUs, at
       least some support for unusual firmware is present, but you should
       consider it highly experimental.
     * Partition tables. Officially, GRUB Legacy supports only the old MBR
       partitioning scheme. Most Linux distributions, however, ship with
       versions of GRUB Legacy that incorporate unofficial GUID Partition
       Table (GPT) support. GRUB 2 includes official GPT support.
     * RAID and LVM. GRUB Legacy doesn't support software-based redundant
       array of independent disks (RAID) or Logical Volume Manager (LVM)
       configurations. This means that you must have at least one file system
       in a standard partition (or in a RAID 1 configuration) so that GRUB
       Legacy can read its configuration files. GRUB 2 supports Linux's forms
       of RAID and LVM. Thus, you can configure your system with nothing but
       RAID or LVM partitions.
     * File system support. To read configuration files, GRUB must be able to
       read the file system in which such files are stored. GRUB Legacy
       supports fewer than a dozen file systems, including the Second
       Extended Filesystem (ext2fs), File Allocation Table (FAT), Journaling
       File System (JFS), ReiserFS, and Extents File System (XFS). For a
       Linux-only system, file system support in GRUB 2 is similar to that in
       GRUB Legacy; however, GRUB 2 supports some additional non-Linux file
       systems, such as Apple's Hierarchical File System Plus (HFS+),
       Microsoft's NTFS file system, and Sun's ZFS.
     * Kernel support. GRUB Legacy can directly boot Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD,
       OpenBSD, and all operating systems that follow the Multiboot
       Specification, which includes the GNU HURD kernel, OpenSolaris, and a
       few others. GRUB 2 can directly boot all these same kernels plus XNU
       (the Mac OS X and Darwin kernel). Booting other operating systems,
       such as Windows?, requires both GRUB Legacy and GRUB 2 to chain-load
       another boot loader.

If grub2's development has stagnated, it's a damn shame...

         --Arthur Corliss
           Live Free or Die
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Received on Sun Jan 9 18:22:30 2011