Re: Searching UUID on floppies

[Robert Millan <rmh@aybabtu.com>]

On Sat, May 31, 2008 at 01:38:07PM +0800, Bean wrote:
> On Sat, May 31, 2008 at 6:14 AM, Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org> wrote:
> > Hello!
> >
> > An old system with a floppy drive has a minor regression with the
> > current GRUB.  It makes some noises for a second or two when GRUB loads,
> > apparently trying to find a floppy disk in the drive.
> >
> > It's possible that some misconfigured systems may even hang or wait for
> > a long time if the floppy drive is absent, but BIOS expects it to be
> > present.  It's easy to blame users, but it will be seen as a regression.
> >
> > Perhaps the UUID search should start with the hard drives and then go to
> > the floppies as the last resort?
> 
> Good point, but I think we shouldn't hard coded the scan method in
> search. Perhaps we can add a option to search to skip some device,
> something such as:
> 
> search --ignore-device=fd /file
> 
> Or we can use a variable like:
> 
> noscan=fd
> 
> The advantage of using variable is that we can use it in findroot as well.

Some of our commands use --no-floppy.  Also supported in GRUB Legacy (by 'find'
or so, can't remember).  Perhaps it's better to use that for consistency?  It
is the floppy scan which everyone hates; for other devices I don't think
people will mind if GRUB spends a few ms on them.

./util/i386/pc/grub-install.in:  --no-floppy             do not probe any floppy drive
./util/i386/pc/grub-install.in:    --no-floppy)
./util/i386/pc/grub-install.in: no_floppy="--no-floppy" ;;
./util/i386/efi/grub-install.in:  --no-floppy             do not probe any floppy drive
./util/i386/efi/grub-install.in:    --no-floppy)
./util/i386/efi/grub-install.in:        no_floppy="--no-floppy" ;;
./util/grub-mkdevicemap.c:    {"no-floppy", no_argument, 0, 'n'},
./util/grub-mkdevicemap.c:  -n, --no-floppy           do not probe any floppy drive\n\
./docs/grub.texi:@item --no-floppy

-- 
Robert Millan

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