Re: GRUB 1.90 is released

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

On Thursday 11 August 2005 13:22, Marco Gerards wrote:
> > I also don't think we could find any file big enough to need 3 levels of
> > indirection.
>
> It can be a problem if someone uses the loopback command.

It's a good example.

Besides that, we must learn from the history. Many years ago, nobody could 
imagine that computers would have more than 1MB memory. So the braindead Gate 
A20 had to be invented. Likewise, nobody could imagine that hard disks would 
exceed 500MB. So LBA mode had to be invented. You can find many similar 
problems from the computer history.

The causes were sometimes technical limitations, but mostly human limitations 
that we often assume that what we see *now* are everything. Instead, we must 
always think that the future is unpredictable. If you feel that something is 
big enough in reality, it is a bad sign - because the reality changes.

In fact, some people already use quite big initrd, such as 100MB. I think it 
would be just a problem of time that people start using 1GB initrd, 
considering that the price of memory chips is decreasing quickly. Nowadays, 
even so-called embedded systems have 32MB or more memory. (So, when I see 
someone saying "necessary to optimize applications for embedded systems due 
to the resource limitations", I cannot stop laughing, since the target 
systems are always more powerful than my first "desktop computer".)

BTW, the current implementation of GRUB has the limitation of 2TB in the disk 
handling. We will have to solve this in near future.

Okuji