Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

IBM Engineer Has Been Exploring Possible Rust Modules For GRUB

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • IBM Engineer Has Been Exploring Possible Rust Modules For GRUB

    Phoronix: IBM Engineer Has Been Exploring Possible Rust Modules For GRUB

    IBM engineer Daniel Axtens presented at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference on the prospects of using the Rust programming language for creating modules for the GRUB2 boot-loader...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Hmmm... Fair, but why not a Rust boot loader instead?

    Comment


    • #3
      Originally posted by tildearrow View Post
      Hmmm... Fair, but why not a Rust boot loader instead?
      Agree with this. If you're going to make a frankenstein bootloader (grub already has a horrible codebase), you should consider writing one from scratch.

      systemd-boot already showed that switching bootloader isn't the end of the world, so it could be a nice upgrade to Linux to have a small, high quality and safe bootloader.
      Last edited by kvuj; 24 September 2021, 03:53 PM.

      Comment


      • #4
        Originally posted by kvuj View Post

        Agree with this. If you're going to make a frankenstein bootloader (grub already has a horrible codebase), you should consider writing one from scratch.

        systemd-boot already showed that switching bootloader isn't the end of the world, so it could be a nice upgrade to Linux to have a small, high quality and safe bootloader.
        I'd actually advocate for extremely simple bootloaders whose entire task it is to just pass the OS-set cmdline to it. And have the boot manager be a separate piece of software that does that better, i.e rEFInd.

        Comment


        • #5
          Originally posted by iskra32 View Post

          I'd actually advocate for extremely simple bootloaders whose entire task it is to just pass the OS-set cmdline to it. And have the boot manager be a separate piece of software that does that better, i.e rEFInd.
          This can be done without any bootloader on most modern systems, efistub is the answer. On Arch mkinitcpio v31 add some nice settings for getting automatic setup for it https://linderud.dev/blog/mkinitcpio...nd-uefi-stubs/ it works really well.

          Comment


          • #6
            Originally posted by iskra32 View Post

            I'd actually advocate for extremely simple bootloaders whose entire task it is to just pass the OS-set cmdline to it. And have the boot manager be a separate piece of software that does that better, i.e rEFInd.
            What you described is systemd-boot, and all of this is why it is being used in Pop!_OS instead of GRUB.

            Comment


            • #7
              Legitimate question, why does GRUB need to be so complex? Is there any good reason to do everything it does? Most of the time, you don't even see it.

              Comment


              • #8
                Originally posted by Ironmask View Post
                Legitimate question, why does GRUB need to be so complex? Is there any good reason to do everything it does? Most of the time, you don't even see it.
                GRUB is not all that complex, GRUB2 is. The reason is IMO twofold. First, it suffers from a fundamental design flaw. It took the "modularity is good" postulate too literally and went on to build not a boot loader, but an uber-modular bootloader framework to end all bootloaders.

                The second (related) problem is that it wants to be all things to everyone on any OS running on any hardware architecture. Like many such things, it's trying to be infinitely configurable for every hypothetically conceivable scenario. Of course, all 99.99999% of the users are asking for is to load an OS kernel from an UEFI bios, thank you very much, but that kind of got lost in translation.

                Comment


                • #9
                  The real solution is to get rid of GRUB 2 as another has mentioned. Putting lipstick on a pig isn't going to fix the problem that GRUB 2 was poorly designed and poorly written. Modern systems have no need at all for GRUB 2. Neither UEFI nor Core Boot need an intermediary boot loader.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Rust, C, D, Go - anyone up for Come ?

                    Comment

                    Working...
                    X