sharing /boot among multible Linux distros

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 11/27/2013 04:24 AM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>
> On Nov 26, 2013, at 7:39 PM, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
>
>> On 11/26/2013 11:56 PM, poma wrote:
>>> On 26.11.2013 23:18, Michael Schwendt wrote:
>>>
>>>> That's because your setup is wrong. If I were you, I would install a
>>>> bootloader into the boot sector of each of your /boot partitions and
>>>> chainload them from your MBR.
>>>
>>> Are you kidding?
>>
>> I guess, he isn't. It's what I recommend, too. It's the only way to make sure the different OSes/distros bootloaders do not interfere with each other.
>
> Well it's not a good recommendation to do what is explicitly not recommended by GRUB devs.

Correct, they are warning about it, but this doesn't mean their 
recommendation is any good. To me, this is just one of those many grub2 
usability regression.

> grub-install spits out a warning if you try to do this, by the way. It requires the user pass --force for it to work. And --force also isn't supported by anaconda for 4-5 Fedora releases now.
Right. Why do you think people like me have been complaining about 
anaconda? Its usability has regressed. This is issue is one detail 
contributing to it.

> It can't be used if /boot is on XFS or LVM or md RAID, all of which lack boot loader padding areas, so fewer configurations are supported.
Well, I am using one dedicated boot partition for each Linux distro and 
a common /boot and so far haven't had any problems.

> The earlier suggestion to have the primary grub.cfg include an entry using configfile to point to each distribution's grub.cfg is the better way to handle this.
 From my experience, this a way which is guaranteed to kill your system 
in longer terms, because different distros' grub configs are too different.

> Each distribution updates only their own grub.cfg. And as far as I'm aware, no distribution ever re-runs grub-install,
Distro upgrades and rescuing installations may do so.

Ralf