Re: Putting core.img anywhere

[Jean-Christophe Haessig]

Le mardi 22 juillet 2008 à 23:47 +0200, Robert Millan a écrit :
>  
> > As I stated earlier my disks are not DOS-partitioned (e.g.
> > pvcreate /dev/hda). I didn't want to have one useless level
> 
> Turns out it wasn't as useless as you thought :-)

heh :)

> > since LVM already does the job (better).
> 
> LVM does the job of managing storage partitions, but not the "job" of 
> reserving
> a gap for GRUB to use.

LVM leaves some sectors at the beginning of the disk. This can be chosen
at pvcreate time, AFAIK one can leave between 1 and 4 sectors before the
LVM header. Which is sufficient since LILO does fine with such a setup,
after all. 

> Furthermore, the scheme you propose looks overly complicated [1]

Complicated ?? You must be kidding me ! A ten-year old would understand
it. It is way more complicated to include filesystem support in a
bootloader.
In fact I thought about this scheme because one of the features of GRUB
(compared to LILO) was to work without having to reinstall each time a
kernel is altered. I included the random number chain scheme to keep the
thing woking even if the core.img file was moved by accident. Random
numbers were just here to minimize the risk of using a wrong block that
just happens to have the correct value. 
But using a simple blocklist (just as LILO does) to locate the core.img
would also work (and is quite less complicated), just a little less
robust. I wonder why this isn't alredady possible, BTW.

> maybe […] switching to Coreboot [3]?

Coreboot is, indeed, interesting.

JC

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