On Fri, 2006-10-06 at 20:43 +0200, Marco Gerards wrote: > "Markus Laire" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > On 10/5/06, Marco Gerards <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> I'm looking forwards to your ideas, questions, suggestions, criticism > >> and bug reports. :-) > > > > Will there be any support for writing data to HD? Even a simple > > support for writing some data to HD would allow quite a lot of ideas > > to be implemented in grub which would be impossible with read-only > > access.
I agree this would be a great feature. > The disk support in GRUB 2 supports writing to disk. However, it is > not used. > > > Full support for writing to filesystems is likely far too much to ask. > > Right. > > > But what about a possibility to create a certain file in advance (e.g. > > /boot/grub/mydata filled with e.g. 1MB of zeroes) and then an ability > > to write to that file without changing the size of the file. > > Writing zero's reliable. For example, filesystem implementations > might change this into a sparse file. Another problem could be > reiserfs, which stores metadata and data in the same sectors, IIRC. > > So instead of using zero's, we could of course use ones. For reiserfs > we would have to look how big the file has to be to make sure metadata > won't share this sector. > > But still, it is something we have to be extremely careful with. And > a more important question is: Why do you want this, do you have > specific uses for such feature in mind? I can think of things like > fallback, etc. Yeah, we should focus on enabling some specific features. > > Alternative idea would be to create a partition (without any > > filesystem) specifically for saving some data from grub, and then grub > > would just give a read/write access to that partition as a single > > block of data. > > I don't like this, it will make it hard or impossible to install GRUB > on certain systems. I like this; it's nice and simple. It's also similar to the situation with Open Firmware and NVRAM. This approach could extend to NVRAM on other systems as well... Systems without a free partition just wouldn't be able to take advantage of the feature. -Hollis _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
