Re: future of grub commands setup and install ?

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@ubuntu.com>]

On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 10:17:42AM -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 09:46:53AM +0200, lode leroy wrote:
> > I think it would be helpful if a command existed to install grub from grub, 
> > given a directory /boot/grub/ already present, i.e. Write boot sector+stage1 
> > to the disk. It may be easy to copy files onto the filesystem, but not-so-easy
> > to create a working native grub.
> 
> grub2 doesn't have a stage1.  It creates one after examining the system
> it is running on to determine which modules have to be used to create
> the stage1.

You and lode leroy are both confusing GRUB Legacy's Stage 1.5 (or
possibly Stage 2) with Stage 1.  GRUB Legacy's Stage 1 is the boot
sector, and is precisely equivalent to GRUB 2's boot.img, which is a
single 512-byte file.

> Also, should it be generating an efi, or pc-bios, or ieee-* image?

This is clearly specific to the GRUB build you're using.

> With grub1 it was simple.  There was one stage1, and a certain set of
> stage1.5 files (one per supported filesystem) and a stage2.  That was it.
> nothing modular, nothing to assemble.  If you take all the modules for
> grub2, you end up with a 1MB+ stage1 file, which you can't embed in
> one track.

Modules are built into a core.img object which is analogous to something
a bit like GRUB Legacy's Stage 1.5 and a bit like Stage 2.  See
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html#Images for a
conversion chart.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@ubuntu.com]