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Ubuntu 12.10 Tries For Last Minute GRUB 2.00

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  • #11
    When you look at



    you will notice that cjwatson is also maintaining the debian patches, i am sure it is not that big deal for him to update some things which are not yet upstream. When i tried to update the package on my own i failed because of the grub-extras from the debian dir - disabling patches is not the problem basically. For some of my systems i used plain grub bzr - 2.00 is already too old, has got problems with some special cases. A simple package which is easyly updateable to bzr would be nice to have (look into mplayer(2) debian dir as example) - dmraid support might not be optimal, but mdadm (even for intel raid) seems to work nicely even with gpt/efi. The debian grub did not detect that device - for efi you usually mount the efi partition to /boot/efi and just call grub-install with grub in efi mode. dmraid does not work with gpt anyway, so you can forget it. it needs partprobe to show gpt partitions - by default it only works with mbr partitions.

    When you compare 1.99 to 2.00 in user perspective you find those things:

    * the default behaviour changed a bit, usually only 1 kernel is shown and every entry which is added by os-prober - not really needed but does not hurt.
    * you can use a new default theme, looks pretty nice if you like the milkyway
    * the scripting language it much improved as it is now possible to check if grub is running in efi mode via an environment var and some other extra features - this example lists all windows uefi installs (use as /boot/grub/custom.cfg) only if booted via efi:
    Code:
    if [ "$grub_platform" == "efi" ]; then
     insmod regexp
     for bootmgfw in (*)/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi; do 
      if [ -e "$bootmgfw" ]; then
       regexp --set=device '(\(.*\))' "$bootmgfw"
       menuentry "Boot Windows UEFI from device $device" "$device" "$bootmgfw" {
        root="$2"
        chainloader "$3" 
       }
      fi
     done
    fi
    I really think it is needed to update the grub2 package not only for Ubuntu but for Debian as well.

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    • #12
      Why do I have the feeling that no one ever explained the meaning of "beta phase" to the Ubuntu developers?

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      • #13
        Well i think they could have switched earlier, grub 2.00 was released end of june. And since then i wait for Debian packages

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        • #14
          kano: well the potential problem is that grub 2.00 is pretty substantially diverged from 1.99 in code terms; re-diffing all those patches for 2.00 won't be trivial. I think it's a good thing for Ubuntu and Debian to go to 2.00, don't get me wrong, they need to get out of this trap they're in where they have a bunch of downstream patches which they can't upstream because they're against an old codebase, and which stop them updating to 2.00. (It'll be a good benefit to the whole ecosystem if they can get all their patches upstreamed cleanly - some of them look like useful things to have upstream, but no distro using 2.00 can really use them without doing all the re-diffing...). I just hope they have enough time before 12.10 to get it done properly.

          We (Fedora) had some heartache with the new nested menu format in 2.00 for F17, because it messed with our grub config update scripts. If Ubuntu uses grub-mkconfig, though, they shouldn't have that problem at least. There's probably others though.

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          • #15
            Why doesn't Fedora use grub-mkconfig? You can simply tune the scripts installed into /etc/grub.d to match your needs. Btw. is gummiboot officially supported? The script that creates the loader entries seems to expect that /boot is mounted to the EFI partition (Debian/Ubuntu usually expects that /boot/efi is mounted there when grub-efi is used).
            Last edited by Kano; 13 September 2012, 07:27 AM.

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            • #16
              Originally posted by Kano View Post
              Why doesn't Fedora use grub-mkconfig? You can simply tune the scripts installed into /etc/grub.d to match your needs. Btw. is gummiboot officially supported? The script that creates the loader entries seems to expect that /boot is mounted to the EFI partition (Debian/Ubuntu usually expects that /boot/efi is mounted there when grub-efi is used).
              I actually would kinda like us to, and if we started from scratch, we probably would. But for grub1, which had no mkconfig, we wrote grubby, which just takes the last kernel entry and copies it and adjusts it for the new kernel. So now we have it, and people are kinda reluctant to let it go. It *is* simpler and theoretically less likely to explode than mkconfig, which regens the whole thing from scratch each time. But personally, honestly, I'd like to just use mkconfig as upstream intends. Hey, I'm not the kernel packagers.

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              • #17
                Originally posted by asdx
                So they are like, "We were wrong after all and we are going to switch to GRUB2 just a few days before the real release"?

                Pfft, no wonder that distro sucks for anything serious.
                Not really. Debian and Ubuntu have been using grub2 for quite a long time, longer than most distros. But they've been using 1.99 builds (older pre-releases of 2.00), even though 2.00-beta builds have been available for several months and the 2.00 final build since June. They're now aiming to bump from their older 1.99 build to a 2.00 final build.

                There's quite a lot of change from the 1.99 builds to the 2.00 builds, and those changes mean that a lot of the patches Debian/Ubuntu are carrying need updating, which I guess is why they didn't bump to 2.00 earlier.

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