Re: mkfs command in grub

[technologypages@yahoo.com]

Tomáš, unfortunately your solution to the swap sharing problem is 
suboptimal -- swapping through filesystem code to a file in a VFAT 
filesystem will quite likely be a order of magnitude slower than raw 
partition access. It's OK if you are a casual Linux user, but not 
acceptable if you are a casual Windows user like me :).

Okuji, it's a matter of theoretical purism vs pragmatical problem 
solving. As Marco already said, we can't change the behaviour of 
non-free software. Hence we need to manipulate the swap partition before 
booting Windows in this particular (and very common) use-case. Preparing 
the swap partition for Windows is possible from a Linux shutdown script, 
but this solution is fragile (one can imagine plenty of cases when the 
script will not be run), and is not really Linux's responsibility 
(preparing a partition for another OS). Which brings us back to the fact 
that in this particular case it is the bootloader's responsibility. I 
agree that this functionality should not be part of the core, but as 
GRUB 2 is supposedly modular (haven't seen the code though), it should 
be available as a module.

Could someone who knows the code please envisage what should be done in 
order to implement the mkfs module?