SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Softpedia News reports that version 2.02 of the GRUB boot loader has been released. Among the many new features are support for LZ4 compression on ZFS, 64-bit ext2, XFS v5, Morse code output and a modem-like output through the PC speaker, Xen paravirtualisation, TrueCrypt ISOs, Apple fat binaries on non-Apple hardware, and 16-bit mode on non-x86 hardware.
Further information:
NEWS file
Related stories:
Windows 8 Update Erases Grub, Enables Secure Boot
Press Backspace 28 times: Pwn Unlucky Linux Systems Running GRUB
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Rich on Sunday April 30 2017, @02:33AM (4 children)
Let's call it "chain-booting", wherein a Linux system is able to reboot into another kernel image. Otherwise, the GRUB people won't stop their madness until they can boot from source, from GitHub, over a VPN. Booting from BIOS/EFI would get restricted to anything trivially accessible locally (which excludes ZFS clusters and similar logical contraptions). Anyone who wants to boot weird shit can start a primary Linux system hat has all the means of getting data from whereever imaginable and can then hand off to the desired target.
Grub has been to me, since it has taken over from Lilo in the major distros, a constant source of frustration, despair, anger, and outright hate towards its developers. It's been at least on par with xorg.conf when configuring this was still required. Their level of fuckedupness might be understandable for a project that is constantly used by a small minority "in the know", but not for something that everyone has to use, but only needs to touch maybe once a year.
One thing they could occupy themselves with, where I wouldn't object against a little complexity, would be graphics. As in "hold the control key upon boot and be presented with a nice choice of boot targets to click on".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 30 2017, @03:05AM (2 children)
I dunno, I've been using Grub since forever because I got irritated at Lilo. Lilo did have graphics support, which was nice, but editing the boot command line in the bootloader and not having to constantly write a new MBR is what sold me on Grub.
I see a lot of bitching about Grub, but I'm not sure I understand. What kinds of issues do you have?
Once I stop being lazy about learning how to set up EFI secure boot for my install, I'll probably stop using a boot manager all together, since EFI provides its own boot menu.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rich on Sunday April 30 2017, @04:10AM (1 child)
What kinds of issues do you have?
I plainly have no idea what to do.
And this statement is from someone who brought up embedded hardware from bare metal with an ICE, customized U-Boot to suit the hardware, and built a fitting kernel for it before. I'm careful with generalizing my own rare experience, but if I, with that background, consider doing anything with Grub a major WTF-experience, it probably is complete crap, at least as far as usability is concerned.
These days I'm mostly aware of the pitfalls, so I head straight to Stackoverflow or a similar site for the "How to restore your MBR (with a recent Grub versuion)" guide for dummies, and I'm set. And with its off-by-one partition naming it's not even a decent fit for Linux. I do understand that this and its other weird features are great help to the Hurd crowd for debugging their stuff, though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 01 2017, @03:53PM
I plainly have no idea what to do.
Join the club,
Grub, I was happy with, Grub2 on the other hand, is a clusterfsck POS that works, its wonders to perform...on all my desktops, but I'll be fscked if I'll have it on my servers. Too much 'black magic' hidden in way too many bloody config files..and I've gotten to the point on the desktops that if it works, I don't go poking the sleeping bear.
As to these config files, back in the day I used to program in APL (necessity, not choice...well, admittedly some choice.) I'd rather go back and program in APL than try figure out WTF is going on in some of these config files, hell, I'd rather go back and do some SPARC assembly than fiddle with them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 30 2017, @05:34PM
Th technology you're looking for is called "kexec"