Re: [gentoo-user] A tiny titillating taste of grub2

[Volker Armin Hemmann]

On Sunday 09 January 2011 22:04:44 Alan McKinnon wrote:
> Apparently, though unproven, at 19:48 on Sunday 09 January 2011, Dale did
>
> opine thusly:
> > It seems grub2 is a whopper.  Check this out:
> >
> > root@fireball / # du -shc boot
> > 13M     boot
> > 13M     total
> > root@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
> > root@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

and of course it uses a way to load the OS everybody else says is broken. GNU 
ftw!