future of grub commands setup and install ?

future of grub commands setup and install ?

[Treutwein Bernhard]

according to the wiki the commands install & setup are "unecessary".

I do consider setup (which itself uses install) as "desirable" at least. 

What are the opinions about it?

Background: I rarely have Linux installed on systems, where I'd like to put
grub on and I have used setup to put grub there (see:
http://www.lrz.de/~bernhard/grub-oberon.html).

regards & thanks in advance
--
  Bernhard

Re: future of grub commands setup and install ?

[Robert Millan]

2010/9/9, Treutwein Bernhard <Bernhard.Treutwein@verwaltung.uni-muenchen.de>:
> according to the wiki the commands install & setup are "unecessary".
>
> I do consider setup (which itself uses install) as "desirable" at least.

GRUB lacks filesystem write support (intentionally).  Therefore, installing
GRUB from GRUB is not possible.  Given that setup command can only
perform part of this, it is unrealistic to pretend setup command is useful.
This is why it was removed.

-- 
Robert Millan

Re: future of grub commands setup and install ?

[Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko]

On 09/09/10 14:14, Robert Millan wrote:
> 2010/9/9, Treutwein Bernhard<Bernhard.Treutwein@verwaltung.uni-muenchen.de>:
>    
>> according to the wiki the commands install&  setup are "unecessary".
>>
>> I do consider setup (which itself uses install) as "desirable" at least.
>>      
> GRUB lacks filesystem write support (intentionally).  Therefore, installing
> GRUB from GRUB is not possible.  Given that setup command can only
> perform part of this, it is unrealistic to pretend setup command is useful.
> This is why it was removed.
>
>    
OTOH it should be realistic to port GRUB to any OS having GCC and decent 
binutils, I hope Bluebottle is included (I don't have a lot of 
experience with it even though it';s developped at my university).
Also it would be a good idea to distribute a free kernel (e.g. 
linux-libre) with a small initramfs with busybox, few useless tools and 
GRUB. This would be esily loadable from GRUB regardless of media and 
will be able to perform all GRUB-related tasks except compiling.


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

RE: future of grub commands setup and install ?

[Treutwein Bernhard]

> > I do consider setup (which itself uses install) as 
> "desirable" at least.
> 
> GRUB lacks filesystem write support (intentionally).  
> Therefore, installing GRUB from GRUB is not possible.  
> 

but installation in MBR or PBR does not need filesystem 
support

> Given that setup command can only perform part of this, 
> it is unrealistic to pretend setup command is useful.
> 

have I misunderstood the functioning of setup in Grub legacy:

It checks the availability of the files in the filesystem and
copies the necessary stuff (including the block "pointers") to
MBR or PBR. In this case it needs only read access to the file
system. 

Otherwise: please give me some tutorial, what it does.

regards
--
  Bernhard 

Re: future of grub commands setup and install ?

[lode leroy]

> GRUB lacks filesystem write support (intentionally).  Therefore, installing
> GRUB from GRUB is not possible.  Given that setup command can only
> perform part of this, it is unrealistic to pretend setup command is useful.
> This is why it was removed.
> 
> -- 
> Robert Millan

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.

-- lode



 		 	   		  

Re: future of grub commands setup and install ?

[Robert Millan]

2010/9/10, lode leroy <lode_leroy@hotmail.com>:
> It may be easy to copy files onto the filesystem, but
> not-so-easy
> to create a working native grub.

What's hard about grub-install /dev/sda ?

-- 
Robert Millan

Re: future of grub commands setup and install ?

[Lennart Sorensen]

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.

Of course it also needs to understand how much space there is for this
stage1 file, which means understanding filesystems or at least partition
layout specifics.

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

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.

-- 
Len Sorensen

Re: future of grub commands setup and install ?

[Colin Watson]

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]

RE: future of grub commands setup and install ?

[Treutwein Bernhard]

> 
> What's hard about grub-install /dev/sda ?
> 
> -- 

you need a running unix linux ...

Bernhard