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Feature Name
Switch to GRUB 2 for the default bootloader in Fedora 12 for new/clean installs
Summary
Fedora (and Red Hat before it) have been maintaining a fork of GRUB Legacy (GNU GRUB 0.9x) because upstream switched to development of GRUB 2. Maintaining a single distro fork is unacceptable when Fedora's policy is to work with upstream.
Owner
- Name: Neal Gompa
- email: <ngompa13 {%} gmail {*} com>
Current status
- Targeted release: Fedora 12
- Last updated: July 10, 2009
- Percentage of completion: 0%
Detailed Description
Back in 1996, GRUB development for GNU GRUB 0.9x basically stopped, and research & development began for GRUB 2. In 2009, with looming advent of a change in hard disks from 512 byte sectors to 4096 byte sectors by next year (which will mess up most existing boot loaders), and with Ubuntu even choosing to start testing for GRUB 2, Fedora should look into switching to GRUB 2 for new installs rather than GRUB Legacy
Benefit to Fedora
GRUB 2 is being actively developed, so work from Fedora to fix bugs or improve GRUB 2 would be able to be pushed back upstream.
- Supports a wider array of filesystems to read from, in particular NTFS, ext4, and HFS+.
- Supports EFI GPT, standard PC, Macintosh, Amiga, Sun, and BSD partition maps
- Supports booting from PCs, Mac/PPC, SPARC, Mac/x86, OLPC/x86, and coreboot/x86.
- Supports chainloading, linux, multiboot, and BSD boot on PCs, and linux on Macs.
- Graphical menu support is available along with UTF-8.
- Supports command history in normal mode
- It is modular and supports module loading
- It is scriptable
Scope
The work needed to make this feature ready for Fedora 12 release will depend on initial testing.
How To Test
GRUB 2 needs to be tested on regular PCs both 32-bit and 64-bit, as well as Mac/PPC and Mac/Intel computers.
To test for this feature initially, no packages really need to be installed. This initial testing is done to determine the scope of work needed to get this feature ready for Fedora 12.
Here are the steps for initial testing:
1. Grab the source code and compile it. Make note of the revision. Note: There are two branches of the source code that Fedora should test, with the expectation of them to be merged soon.
Branch 1: GRUB 2 mainline To grab GRUB 2 mainline source code, run:
svn co svn://svn.savannah.gnu.org/grub/grub2/
Branch 2: GRUB 2 + gfxmenu (Similar to mainline, except includes graphical menu) To grab GRUB 2 + gfxmenu source code, run:
bzr branch http://grub.gibibit.com/bzr/gfxmenu
2. Install it
The core image of GRUB 2 is also a Multiboot kernel, so you can load GRUB 2 by GRUB Legacy:
grub> root (hd0,0)
grub> kernel /boot/grub/core.img
grub> boot
You can generate core.img with grub-install (GRUB 2) by following way:
grub-install --grub-setup=/bin/true /dev/sda
Change /dev/sda to match your device.
Note: This will not install GRUB 2 (core.img) to your MBR. Instead it executes /bin/true for installation which does not do the actual installation. It will prepare core.img and copy necessary files to /boot/grub folder.
After this you can use grub-mkconfig (or it's alias update-grub) to generate /boot/grub/grub.cfg.
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
If you built from the gfxmenu branch, then set up a theme to use.
Grab some pre-made themes at http://grub.gibibit.com/Themes
The method of testing is subject to change depending on correctness of the procedure.
User Experience
If the regular GRUB mainline branch is used, users should expect a very similar experience to using GRUB Legacy. If the GRUB branch that includes the gfxmenu code is used, then either a similar experience to using GRUB Legacy or a new experience with themes used could be expected.
Examples of themes are at http://grub.gibibit.com/Themes
Dependencies
As far as I can tell, none, insofar RPMs. However, I would like to see the gfxmenu code used in GRUB 2 for Fedora. Colin D. Bennett, the writer of the gfxmenu code, hopes that within the next few weeks, the code would be merged into the mainline.
Contingency Plan
None necessary, if this falls through, then revert to using GRUB Legacy.
Documentation
Release Notes
- Fedora now uses GRUB 2 for clean installs. With GRUB 2, there have been changes in how to configure GRUB. For more information, look at the GRUB Wiki
Comments and Discussion