grub / grub2 conflicts

Richard W.M. Jones rjones at redhat.com
Thu Sep 15 14:36:55 UTC 2011


On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 03:31:49PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 03:27:16PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> 
> > So I propose that we drop this conflicts and fix grubby instead.
> 
> No. It is not sane to have multiple bootloaders installed on one 
> machine.

There's an interesting verbal trick there.  "multiple bootloaders" are
not installed.  Multiple versions of the grub RPM package are
installed.  Only one bootloader would be installed on the host.

> Requiring the ability to do so adds a significant amount of 
> extra complexity to the tools associated with it for no useful benefit. 

The useful benefit was outlined in the original email.

> Just install the grub package in the guest, and chroot into the guest if 
> you need to run grub-install there.

Running tools from out of the guest is insecure.  There are several
ways in which a guest could exploit the host if we did this.  See
"Security" here for some issues:

http://libguestfs.org/guestfs.3.html#running_commands

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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