Re: GRUB 2.06

[Didier Spaier]

Hi Daniel and John Paul Adrian,

Le 20/04/2021 à 15:53, Daniel Kiper a écrit :
> Hi Didier,
>
> On Thu, Apr 08, 2021 at 11:26:08PM +0200, Didier Spaier wrote:
>> Le 08/04/2021 à 21:28, Didier Spaier a écrit :
>>> I am fine with shipping GRUB up to some commit in Slint, but not all
>>> distributions accept to do that, or to carry a zillion patches as does
>>> Debian.
>>>
>>> As result, end users complain "GRUB is broken" whereas a patch that 
fix the
>>> issue of which they suffer of has been committed upstream a long 
time ago.
>>>
>>> An example that comes to mind is:
>>> 6643507ce30f775008e093580f0c9499dfb2c485
>>>
>>> Folks running Slackware-current also suffer of it:
>>> 
https://https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/requests-for-current-14-2-15-0-a-4175620463/#post6236544www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/requests-for-current-14-2-15-0-a-4175620463/#post6236544
>>
>> Sorry, wrong link, read:
>> 
https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/requests-for-current-14-2-15-0-a-4175620463/#post6236544www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/requests-for-current-14-2-15-0-a-4175620463/#post6236544
>
> I tried a few times but I am not able to open this link. Sorry...
> Could you explain your problem here?
>
> Daniel

Sorry for the link

Let's try again to paste it:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/requests-for-current-14-2-15-0-a-4175620463/page4.html#post6236544

Anyway here is the posts' content, minus the forum's formatting:

-- pasted post below

Originally Posted by teoberi below:
The root cause is GRUB itself and if I understood correctly from what I 
read on the mailing lists it is not certain that problem will be solved!
@Didier, do you know anything about this?

Answer by Didier:
Indeed, this patch has been committed more than one year ago! From git 
log in the master branch:

[code]commit 6643507ce30f775008e093580f0c9499dfb2c485
Author: Simon Hardy <hidden>
Date:   Tue Mar 24 13:29:12 2020 +0000

    build: Fix GRUB i386-pc build with Ubuntu gcc

    With recent versions of gcc on Ubuntu a very large 
lzma_decompress.img file is
    output. (e.g. 134479600 bytes instead of 2864.) This causes 
grub-mkimage to
    fail with: "error: Decompressor is too big."

    This seems to be caused by a section .note.gnu.property that is 
placed at an
    offset such that objcopy needs to pad the img file with zeros.

    This issue is present on:
    Ubuntu 19.10 with gcc (Ubuntu 8.3.0-26ubuntu1~19.10) 8.3.0
    Ubuntu 19.10 with gcc (Ubuntu 9.2.1-9ubuntu2) 9.2.1 20191008

    This issue is not present on:
    Ubuntu 19.10 with gcc (Ubuntu 7.5.0-3ubuntu1~19.10) 7.5.0
    RHEL 8.0 with gcc 8.3.1 20190507 (Red Hat 8.3.1-4)

    The issue can be fixed by removing the section using objcopy as 
shown in
    this patch.

    Signed-off-by: Simon Hardy <hidden>
    Reviewed-by: Daniel Kiper <hidden>[/code]So it's already in 2.06~rc1.

-- end of pasted post

So, it's hard to understand for many end users that:

1. The issue appeared after gcc-10 began to be used, well after the 
release of grub 2.04.
2. It has been fixed long ago.
3. But for the fix to be effective one of these conditions should be met:
a. A new grub version has been released and is provided by the 
distribution they use.
b. The distributon they use patches the source of GRUB 2.04 to bring the 
fix.
c. The distribution they use provides a package build from a source 
pulled from with the patch already committed.

Unfortunately if none of these conditions is met many users tend
to blame GRUB instead of the distributions and go saying in fora "I'll 
avoid to use GRUB, it's broken"

Best regards,
Didier