GRUB 2: With luck …
… this version, or something not too far away from it, might actually stand a chance of getting into testing.
I’ve just uploaded grub2 1.98+20100702-1. The most significant set of
changes in this release is that it switches /boot/grub/device.map
and the
grub-pc/install_devices
debconf question over to stable device names under
/dev/disk/by-id
(on Linux kernels). The code implementing this is
reasonably careful, and it should make it quite difficult for people to
accidentally fail to upgrade their installed GRUB core image; I explained
the problems that tends to cause in the previous post in this
series. There will probably be a few
small glitches I need to clear up, but I’ve given this much more extensive
testing than usual so I hope I won’t break too many people’s computers (again).
I did this work first in Ubuntu as one of my major goals for 10.04 LTS,
which exposed a few problems that I wanted to fix before inflicting it on
Debian as well (fixes for those are now under testing for 10.04.1). Most
significantly, I felt it was necessary to start offering partitions in the
select list for grub-pc/install_devices
, but I went a bit overboard and
offered all partitions in a giant list. This seemed like a good idea at the
time, but it tended to confuse people into just selecting everything in the
list, which in particular tended to make Windows unbootable! So I dialled
that back a bit, and in the version I just merged it will only offer the
partitions mounted on /
, /boot
, and /boot/grub
(de-duplicating if
necessary). This seems like a reasonable compromise between confusing
people too much and forcing them to install only to MBRs.
My next priority will be making whatever fixes are necessary to get this
version into testing, since the problems with /dev/mapper
symlinks in
testing aren’t getting any less urgent, and this is finally a version that
shouldn’t break for most people due to the kernel’s switch to libata. I
expect that I’ll try to get mdadm 1.x metadata sorted out immediately after that.
Other improvements since my last entry have included:
- Further documentation work. Thanks to Vladimir Serbinenko (and to Jordan
Uggla for hosting it temporarily), there’s now an HTML version of the
GRUB manual from trunk online,
which includes new sections on embedded configuration files, the various
GRUB image files,
device.map
, and (shortly) a summary of changes from GRUB Legacy. - Video improvements: among other things, UEFI systems whose firmware uses the Graphics Output Protocol should now work rather better, and GRUB now includes specific support for some cards often used with minimal firmware support under emulation.
- A fix to handle large memory maps exposed by some UEFI firmware.
- Automatic configuration support for Fedora 13. You may need os-prober 1.39 from unstable as well.
- Automatic configuration support for Linux on Xen.
- Skip LVM snapshots rather than failing when they’re present.