grub / grub2 conflicts

[Matthew Garrett]

On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 09:10:06PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 03:54:28PM -0400, Peter Jones wrote:
> > Yes, but this will hardly help the situation, which right now is that the
> > distro pulls in grub 2, because that's what we've collectively chosen to do,
> > and libguestfs pulls in grub on the host, even though it isn't really using
> > it there. So effectively your solution is to keep the problem we've got
> > right now.
> 
> Tools on the host are often useful in guest situations.
> 
> If I created a filesystem using mke2fs:
> 
>   lvcreate /dev/vg/foo
>   mke2fs /dev/vg/foo
> 
> and attached this to a guest, is that an inappropriate use of host
> tools for a guest?

Yes, if the guest is running a sufficiently old kernel. But mke2fs is 
designed to allow you to create filesystems that will work with 
arbitrary kernels, so it's possible to use it in appropriate ways. grub 
is not designed to be compatible across arbitrary versions, and so using 
it with that expectation is inappropriate.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org