Re: Some ideas about new features of grub

[Michal Suchanek]

2009/7/11 Bean <address@hidden>:
> On Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 5:27 AM, BandiPat<address@hidden> wrote:
>> Actually Zenwalk provides os-prober as well.  The gentleman that provides
>> the installer of our Grub2 uses os-prober to detect all OS's installed, so
>> they may be added to the original grub.cfg.  Works very well, although not
>> perfect, but we are pretty pleased with the results thus far.
>>
>> We also do not have to run any of the Grub2 programs after installing new
>> kernels.  The developer of our installer patched Grub2 for Zenwalk, so that
>> no changes were necessary after kernel updates.  He tried to offer this to
>> you guys as well earlier, but got little response, so we use it for Zenwalk
>> exclusively at the moment.
>
> Hi,
>
> IIRC, os-prober is a collection of shell script to detect os, but grub
> already have them in util/grub.d. This method is based on linux, so
> you need to enter linux in order to update the menu. On the other
> hand, lua script generate the menu inside grub, there is no need to
> enter any os.
>
> Another problem is the drive number. It's impossible to decide bios
> drive number from inside linux, so we can't insert the correct
> drivemap command required to boot DOS/Windows from secondary drive.
> This information must be gathered at boot time.
>

The other problem is that scripts like os-prober that use linux
filesystem code for probing filesystems destroy your data.

Linux cannot mount journalled filesystems readonly. It always modifies
them. The extent of the modifications and the impact may vary
depending on the state of the filesystem (clean/mounted) and the way
you are going to use it in the future (resume the system/fresh boot)
but until Linux people implement readonly filesystem support any Linux
based os-probers cannot be recommended.

Thanks

Michal