Apparently, though unproven, at 19:48 on Sunday 09 January 2011, Dale did opine thusly:
> It seems grub2 is a whopper. Check this out: > > r...@fireball / # du -shc boot > 13M boot > 13M total > r...@fireball / # ls -al /boot/bzImage-2.6.36-r* > -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4201472 Dec 15 00:16 /boot/bzImage-2.6.36-r4-1 > -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4204768 Dec 19 23:11 /boot/bzImage-2.6.36-r4-2 > -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4207168 Jan 4 23:38 /boot/bzImage-2.6.36-r6-1 > r...@fireball / # > > So, my /boot is 13Mbs and I have three kernels there plus copies of > their config files as well. Those are full blown ones since I don't use > modules. I guess grub2 may make some people have to grow their /boot > partition a bit for all that. I'm not planning to try grub2 for a bit > yet but from the looks of it, it's a good thing I made my /boot > partition 200Mbs. o_O > > Why so much you reckon? I did a emerge -pv and it has to install three > more packages, in addition to the ones grub-static pulled in already. > Does grub2 wash dishes too? I need one of those if it does. lol It's trying to be an OS that's a bootloader as it's primary function. Think back to the days of lilo. It obviously isn't an OS and doesn't understand OS concepts - it loads an OS. When that step is done, then and only then do OS concepts come into play. lilo doesn't even understand how to find a file on a disk, that's why the lilo command had to be run to tell the bootloader which sectors on disk it had to shove into memory. This confused people. It annoyed even more people who often forgot to run lilo before rebooting. So grub came along, it had the absolute minimum of OS-like features to find and load a kernel file. It needed it's own syntax of defining drive names, then would make it's way through the read-only fs it found there to find the kernel. It supported a small number of file systems, just enough so that a 50M partition would be usable on almost any platform. grub2 now looks like GNU/grub (sarcasm intended). It's not a bootloader, it's a puny OS with one extra feature - it can bootload! It has support for jpeg, every fs under the sun, and the grub2 ebuild even has a truetype USE flag. Yes! Now my life is complete. I've been DYING for years to have a bootloader that can properly display anti-aliased fonts for the entire 2 seconds it's on- screen -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
