Re: partition layouts

[Marco Gerards <metgerards@student.han.nl>]

Hollis Blanchard <hollis@penguinppc.org> writes:

> The grub ELF file must live on a firmware-native filesystem. When run,
> it can find out what partition it was booted from, so that is a
> natural place to load grub.cfg from as well (and why not modules while
> we're at it?). Thus this is the value of the "prefix" GRUB environment
> variable.

Sounds fine to me, assuming things work like we discussed about.

> Can we have a shortcut to avoid specifying that "(hd,7)/" part
> repeatedly? I think that was the "root" command in GRUB Legacy, which
> was replaced by the "prefix" environment variable? But as I mentioned,
> "prefix" doesn't have the meaning we're looking for here...

There is the root variable, but IIRC there were some problems or so.
Anyway, it is how it will work. :)

> The other possibility is to have all of /boot as a firmware-native
> filesystem. I think that's not ideal though, because those filesystems
> (HFS+, FAT) might not support features like symlinks or Unix-style
> permissions, or may not be as well-tested as Linux-native filesystems.

HFS+ supports symlinks, FAT does not (unless you use UMSDOS, which is
not supported).  For every symlink capable filesystem GRUB 2 supports,
symlink support was implemented.

Personally I do not care very much how it will work in practise.  The
main important thing for me is that we can support both of your
proposals.  I think we just have to try both, when possible on many
different machines.

Thanks,
Marco