Re: GRUB and the risk of block list corruption in extX

[Martin Wilck <martin.wilck@ts.fujitsu.com>]

> This is not a complete answer but one of my problems is that such
> requests don't even suply any kind of reason to go into such installs.
> We nerd to consider usecases before even considering using an approach
> which is known for some pretty serious problems. Will answer in more
> details later.

In my case, the reason is a multiboot setup based on chainloading the
indiviual installed OS's bootloaders from a central, primary bootloader.
This is easily accomplished by installing the individual OS's
bootloaders in their respective "/" or "/boot" partitions. Linux
distributions have encouraged this kind of setup over several years -
"install boot loader in first sector of root/boot partition" used to be
a prominent option somewhere in the installation process (these
distributions were usually GRUB 0.9x based - GRUB 0.9x developers didn't
seem to have a big issue with stage1_5 being loaded via block lists).

Recent GRUB2-based distributions like Fedora have removed this option,
and some users are dissatisfied with that. I would like to understand
what the actual risk is. So I'd appreciate examples for the "pretty
serious problems" you mention.

Regards
Martin


-- 
Dr. Martin Wilck
PRIMERGY System Software Engineer
x86 Server Engineering

FUJITSU
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