On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 03:18:53AM +0930, Brendan Trotter wrote: > Um, what?
Well at least update-grub reads from /etc to generate the final config (which is still /boot/grub/grub.cfg, so it does go in /boot, but since it is generated (at least on my debian system), I don't consider it config anymore). > Imagine you've got 3 OSs: Hiaku, FreeDOS and ReactOS. Given that none > of these OSs normally have an "/etc" directory, which "/etc" should be > used to store GRUB's configuration? Well whichever one is responsible for generating the grub.cfg could store the files wherever is normal on that OS. > Perhaps you're saying that GRUB should be useless for anything that > isn't a Unix clone. In that case, imagine you've got 3 Unix clones. Of > course all of them want to automatically update their boot loader's > configuration when their kernel is updated, and they can't all share > the same "/etc". Does the user nominate one Unix clone as "working" > and let the other 2 OSs fail? I honestly don't personally care at all about any OS that isn't a unix clone anymore. Fortunately, I am only a grub user and not one of the developers. They seem to care. > Using a separate partition for "/boot" that contains GRUB's > configuration for all OSs worked (at least in theory) because all OSs > that are installed could mount that partition without conflicts (as > long as you use a file system that all OSs understand). grub2 certainly has no issue with that. The default is to use grub.cfg in the /boot/grub directory. > I was talking about boot managers, not boot loaders. Why should there be a difference? > Conceptually you have a boot manager (to select which OS to boot) that > doesn't really need to care about any of the details for any > particular OS; plus a boot loader for each OS which is designed > specifically for that OS (and doesn't really need to care about other > file systems, etc). The difference between them often gets blurred > because feature creep is tempting (for example, a lot of the boot > managers I looked at earlier had features for creating/removing > partitions, even though this is normally done using separate utilities > designed for the purpose, like fdisk, parted, etc; and a lot of boot > loaders are probably able to chainload). > > GRUB is different in that it's intended to be a boot manager and a > boot loader for many OSs (and isn't primarily intended for a single > role); and I'd guess that is the reason it has to be too complex to be > "user friendly" for any specific role. Almost every x86 boot loader for linux has also been a boot manager (through chainloading if nothing else). Even the ntldr can do that. It seems to me that a boot manager is a stripped down boot loader that doens't do very much. Seems like a completely useless piece of software to me. I don't get it. -- Len Sorensen _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
