Re: [gentoo-user] Re: minimal grub:2 install? [grub:0 being removed]

[Mick]

On Friday, 18 January 2019 20:57:45 GMT Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2019-01-18, Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards@×××××.com> wrote:
> > On 2019-01-18, Daniel Frey <djqfrey@×××××.com> wrote:
> >> As someone else mentioned you can mask grub-mkconfig. I didn't bother,
> >> it isn't run automatically.
> >
> > I should have known that on Gentoo it wouldn't be.  I ought to think
> > about starting to switch to grub2.  On one of my simpler installs, I
> > may try out the chainloading from grub to grub2 scheme documented at
> >
> > https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GRUB2_Migration
>
> I had some spare time while watching a Windows 10 machine while away a
> few hours doing updates (WTF does it take so long?  Is it rebuilding
> everything from sources?). So, I decided to give the above migration
> scheme a try on one of my "simple" machines, and it worked swimmingly
> except the auto-generated grub.cfg file fell over.  I was not
> surprised. The kernel started to boot, but then locked up at the point
> where the video mode switches.
>
> Fortunately, the chainloading scheme allows you to reboot into a
> working system via grub-0.97 and tweak things until grub-2 works. I
> manually created a grub.cfg file, and it worked fine.  Then I did a
> final 'grub2-install', uninstalled grub:0, and all that's left is to
> clean the grub:0 files out of /boot/grub.
>
> I'm still amazed by the giant mess that grub2-mkconfig spits out.
> It's 90X larger than my manually generated config file:
>
> # grub2-mkconfig 2>/dev/null | wc
>     438    1661   17888
>
> # wc boot/grub/grub.cfg
>      10      17     200 boot/grub/grub.cfg

There's also extlinux of the syslinux project.  I'm thinking of giving this a 
spin on an old system of mine.  It's pretty minimalist, doesn't need re-
installing after adding a new kernel[1] and it will boot FAT, NTFS, ext2/3/4, 
Btrfs, XFS, UFS/FFS, so it should cover my needs.

[1] I'm used to manually editing /boot/grub/grub.conf with legacy grub anyway, 
so extlinux is no different.
-- 
Regards,
Mick