Lennart Talks Up systemd's SD-Boot + Boot Loader Specification

[ryad]

Unpopular opinion (still in 2019...): I'm extremely happy with pulseaudio, systemd and systemd-boot. I've used all alternatives or previous technologies before, but except for syslinux none of the alternatives are competitive in regard to comfort, functionality and documentation.

All the hatred towards these projects and this developer is in my eyes just ridiculous child behavior. It's a good thing that distributions haven't let these rants stop them from making good decisions for years and move forward.

[starshipeleven]

Agreed — in theory, a bootloader is a pretty simple thing... GRUB is only complicated because it's trying to support every bit of hardware (BIOS, EFI, etc) from the last few decades, dealing with an accumulated history of edge cases. So yeah, it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing to have one specialised EFI loader and one specialised next-gen loader, etc, if that makes them easier to maintain than a consolidated codebase that tries to support everything.

No, GRUB is complicated because someone made it like that. It's a small OS with its own API, shell and shell tools that none ever uses (nor know about), that can also boot other OSes on the side.

[beniwtv]

Eh with the Linux kernel EFIstub I no longer need bootloaders, so whatever

[Guest]

Eh with the Linux kernel EFIstub I no longer need bootloaders, so whatever

Great news, I didn't know about this feature.

[Bigon]

But Grub is not a RedHat project.

Neither is systemd...

[jrch2k8]

Just for future reference, GRUB won't boot any modern version of ZoL unless you force the creation of the pool to the oldest version(5000) but if you ever upgrade your pool be prepared for a surprise, also GRUB won't boot encrypted roots, etc. etc. etc.

If you have a recent UEFI system(even my b85/970fx oldest motherboards work like a charm with sd-boot) use sd-boot, this little wonder even boot ZFS through ISCSI.

I can't wait until ARM UEFI become the norm, i would love to kill uboot with fire and dance naked around it while it burns

[Delgarde]

No, GRUB is complicated because someone made it like that. It's a small OS with its own API, shell and shell tools that none ever uses (nor know about), that can also boot other OSes on the side.

And they made it like that because they wanted to support _every_ use case in a single boot loader. I mean, I agree, it _is_ a small OS — but it's not complicated because they wanted it to be complicated, it's complicated because it does too much, and doing everything they want it to do basically _requires_ a small OS.

[caligula]

Well, you see, I would but:

My system is MBR only

Unify that and get back to me

Maybe you should establish a computer museum?

[caligula]

having just played with converting from mbr to efi - I wish I had known about sd-boot before wrangling grub to do it

MBR is a disk partition layout, EFI is a firmware specification. You've probably switched from MBR to GPT? GPT works without EFI, too.

[caligula]

Why doesn't syslinux devs contribute to GRUB?

I hate so much when I hear there's a syslinux dev called Lennart and he's focusing on 320 kB floppies or more recent hardware. Why doesn't anyone develop modern state of the art technology for my 128 kB 8" floppies?