GRUB 2 in Ubuntu 9.10

[Jeremy Katz]

On Wednesday, June 10 2009, Richard W.M. Jones said:
> On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 06:41:55PM +0200, Dennis J. wrote:
> > [..] with fedoras "stay close to upstream" mantra.
> 
> I'm glad somebody said it.
> 
> Can someone summarise what the problems are with GRUB2?

grub2 is an entirely new codebase and could just as well be called
ZXCIVU and be as accurate :-)  The only close to connection is that it
was originally one of the grub developers working on it, but when I last
looked, even that wasn't the case anymore.

I need to sit down and figure out where it is in the realm of capability
vs our grub[1] these days, but just haven't had enough round 'tuits.

Jeremy

[1] So, the gory history for those who might be interested.  Eight years
ago (!), we decided that the advantage of not having to rerun lilo after
changing the config file as you can just read the config file off the
filesystem with grub was worthwhile.  We had, at that point, been
patching lilo for quite a while to have a graphical menu.  Therefore,
keeping a graphical menu was a branding requirement.  Connectiva at the
time had a patch to grub that worked.  We picked it up, shipped it, and
it (mostly) worked.  Efforts were made to integrate upstream, but they
were largely uninterested.  Along the way, significant changes to the
graphics patch had to be made as grub evolved and a few other efforts
were made to push it upstream.  Eventually, the answer was "no, we'll do
something in the next big version of grub after grub 1.0".  Then the
main developers went away and we were basically left maintaining a
(large at this point) fork.  As there is no upstream for grub 0.9x left,
we've been left in a position of maintaining it and we've added some
real features that have been needed along the way as grub 2's progress
has been slow at best and some of the design decisions early on were a
bit iffy[2].  And so we are where we are today.  If it makes people feel
better, we can rename grub to x86bl :-)

[2] Caring more about OF boot than a BIOS boot for one notable example
that sticks out in my head.  But this is 3-4 years ago, so my memory is
fuzzy