Re: Some suggestions for improvements in GRUB

["Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko" <phcoder@gmail.com>]

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On 22.04.2012 20:49, Karthik Krishna wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I am an engineering student from India. I have been using Linux
> Distros for some time. With its varied uses i have come to like GRUB
> very much. But i wish to say that there are certain things that are
> not user friendly and needs a bit of change.
>
Such presentations are redundant. We treat the patches all the same
independently of who you are.
> First of all, if a drive is deleted or edited using any partition
> manager, GRUB does not know anything about it. And so in the ensuing
> part of booting, it shows a boot error. i have been seeing this as my
> friends keep coming to me to "FIX" their boot. The problem lies in
> GRUB's steep learning curve in the  fixing department. when the grub
> error screen comes up, one has to come up with a plan to go to the
> internet and see the required grub error codes and relevant data to
> fix it. Thereby restoring grubs working.  But the thing is you need an
> another PC/laptop with a working internet to see the codes or relevant
> data. i have been doing this for some time. i see that people who wish
> to use Linux have a hard time using it fully, especially when it comes
> to its boot-loader.
GRUB2 has no error codes at all.
>
> The onset of boot-loader problems really bogs down the motivation to
> move forward.
>
> So I wish to develop GRUB a bit so that it may be easy to use even in
> the case of error handling. I just dont know where to start. I know
> assembly, a bit of c and c++. I have heard of nasm and used gcc. So
> how do i develop it? I wanted to make a code that automatically
> detects partitions and checks it with a library of partitions to see
> if it has been changed or not. So that way the user is given the
> freedom of not doing anything rather letting GRUB doing the work for
> the user. i can develop the code using a simple algorithm. i want to
> make grub more smarter when it comes to handling errors and freeing
> the user.
>
In most places GRUB2 uses UUIDs which shouldn't change on partition
modifications. The only place another form is used is on prefix
specification and platform-specific install (embedding zone, EFI
partition, PreP and so on).
It's possible to add --no-use-partition-number to grub-install for the
first part, the patch is 3-5 lines, but it increases kernel size.
As for the second, there is no way around it as on most platforms it's
tied in to platform limitations.
You need to rerun grub-install after important partitioning changes.

-- 
Regards
Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko



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