Re: Next release?

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

On Wednesday 16 July 2008 01:21:57 Pavel Roskin wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-07-16 at 01:15 +0200, Yoshinori K. Okuji wrote:
> > OK. Then how do you install GRUB into (hd1) in a development machine,
> > which is (hd0) in a booting machine? When GRUB may not correctly
> > determine BIOS drives, do you want to just give up?
>
> The boot drive can be determined at boot.
>
> Granted, there are buggy BIOSes, but we handle it already.  All we need
> is to encode into the bootloader that it was installed on a hard drive
> (actually, not on a floppy, real or emulated), and the bootloader would
> use 0x80 rather than the value from BIOS.
>
> We don't need specific drive numbers like 0x81.  We need one bit of
> information, and we can figure it out at the install time.

If a boot drive is the same as a root drive, you are right. Otherwise we need 
to do so.

I think we have seen tons of examples with GRUB Legacy which may not be solved 
automatically in all cases. If one digs into the archive of bug-grub, I guess 
several cases would be found easily. With GRUB 2, we can avoid embedding BIOS 
drive numbers in many cases, using UUIDs or labels or files. But this does 
not always work, so I am afraid that we need to support device.map, even if 
it is an evil necessity.

Regards,
Okuji