[Bug 872826] f18 anaconda - no option to install bootloader to a partition

John Reiser jreiser at bitwagon.com
Mon Dec 3 02:57:55 UTC 2012


> I'm not seeing such an option in mke2fs. If it is possible to change the padding/offset, then it would be possible for a continuous installation of GRUB2's boot.img and core.img, without using block lists.
> 
> I did get slightly incorrect, ext4 has two boot sectors, for a total of 1024 bytes of code which is still too small for GRUB to fit without block lists. I'm curious how other bootloaders get away with less.

Fourteen years ago in 1998 I published a boot loader for i386 that loaded linux
kernel and initrd using filesystem lookup by name from ext2, occupying 446 bytes
of MBR plus 2*510 bytes of bootblock from ext2.  The space also allowed some
tens of bytes of kernel command line.  So "must use block lists" was not true then.

The code is still available at:
   http://www.bitwagon.com/ftp/e2boot4c.tgz
   http://www.bitwagon.com/ftp/mbr03.tgz

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