grub vs. grub2

[Sam Varshavchik]

Reindl Harald writes:

> > Not exactly. This generally happens only with mdraid volumes. Without  
> mdraid, grub2 should
> > fit within 63 sectors, and one of my laptops was succesfully upgraded to  
> F16+grub2, and
> > everything got squeezed into the 63 sectors.
>
> the main question here is: was this luck or is it sure
>
> most machines do not have linux-software-raid

That. Too lazy to look up the bug number, but everyone who's complaining  
ended up there because of mdraid.

It's possible that there might be some other oddball cases that wind up with  
the grub2 image being too fat. I think there was one person who claimed that  
they got bricked by this without mdraid being in the picture, but I don't  
recall the details.

> so if all of them have no problem with the old partition layout
> this all would be relaxed, but even if -> is this now so or
> will future versions of GRUB2 be broken with the old layout

That's certainly possible.

The bottom line is that grub's days are numbered. grub2 is the future. No  
amount of complaining is going to change that. Even if someone stepped up to  
the plate and volunteered to maintain grub going forward, I wouldn't rely on  
it, in perpetuity.

If someone managed to squeeze by this upgrade, great. But all that  
practically means is that they bought themselves some extra breathing time  
to get their affairs in order, and they figure out a schedule for chopping  
up their disks that works for them, instead of scrambling after it's too  
late.

And, it's certainly possible that the affected hardware might reach its end  
of life, before the move to a bigger reserved boot space becomes mandatory,  
so they're off the hook. But there's really no way to tell that.

>
> Gerät  boot.     Anfang        Ende     Blöcke   Id  System
> /dev/sda1   *          63     1044224      522081   83  Linux
>
>
> this is a practical question because i have 20 virtual servers
> installed/cloned 2008 with the old layout, no RAID because this
> is provided by the SAN-STorage behind

Well, if I were you, I'd start figuring out what to do about it, now.

And this highlights a major minus for hardware raid, and the major plus in  
mdraid's factor. If this were mdraid, you could've moved it. It wouldn't be  
easily, but moving a RAID1 mdraid partition, like that, is doable. I did it  
myself.

One of my RAID1 mdraid machines did have its partitions starting at sector  
63. And I managed to rearrange them without having to backup and restore,  
and eventually update everything to F16.

I did blow an entire weekend, on umpteen incremental tweaks to my mdraid  
configs and ext4 partitions, and drinking endless cups of tea, waiting for  
everything to resync, before finally reaching the ultimate goal of both  
halfs of RAID1, on both physical disks, starting on sector 2048. And I'm  
still pissed about pretty much wasting an entire weekend on this nonsense.  
But at least this was doable with mdraid. Theoretically, there is no  
technical barrier to your RAID hardware not being able to do same task, but  
I'd be shocked if it actually had the means for doing that.

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