Re: [PATCH] Remove root drive support

[Pavel Roskin]

On Tue, 2009-06-16 at 01:41 +0200, Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko wrote:

> I successfully tested this patch in qemu with both grub-mkrescue and
> multiboot load grub2-by-grub2. As I see root drive was always set to
> 0xFF and so this field is useless and as it's in size-critical part.
> However reading grub-install revealed that cross-drive install would
> fail if target filesystem has no UUIDs or if UUIDs are unsupported by
> grub. Currently it includes following filesystems:
> affs,afs,cpio/tar,hfs,jfs,minix,sfs, udf, ufs
> As you can see it includes even important filesystems like ufs. Now
> the question to discuss is whether we want to implement UUIDs for this
> fileystems, let it be like it is or have a cross-drive install w/o
> UUIDs. Even if we choose the last option I think root field still has
> to be removed and we can just use non-UUID drive name for prefix

I've committed the patch just before I got this message.  I'm glad you
didn't object.

I think we could implement partition addressing by a contained filename.
As long as GRUB can read the filesystem at all, it should be able to
read filenames.  Then we would specify grub_prefix as

(FILE=/boot/grub/FSID)/boot/grub

FSID could be a random string or is could be the filesystem UUID as read
by the OS.  grub-setup would create such file and hardcode the
corresponding grub_prefix into core.img.

grub_prefix should be writable by grub-setup, so I don't expect any
problems.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin