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Re: [RFC] Dynamic device.map


From: Colin Watson
Subject: Re: [RFC] Dynamic device.map
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2009 08:12:52 +0000
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.18 (2008-05-17)

On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 01:55:27AM +0100, Robert Millan wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 09, 2009 at 11:04:43PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> > I'm trying to figure out how to make Debian's grub-installer operate
> > without a device.map; it has various legacy bits and pieces that need
> > conversion, and I'm working on these.
> > 
> > Along the way, though, I noticed that grub-install still unconditionally
> > creates a device.map. This seems likely to become confusing if devices
> > are changing around a lot, since it's never updated. I'd like to get to
> > the point where it doesn't do this by default. How about we add support
> > for an option to disable this, and make grub-installer and the Debian
> > maintainer scripts pass it once they're ready? Some time later, we can
> > flip the default value.
> 
> Why is this option necessary?  If we removed automated generation of
> device.map, user can still call grub-mkdevicemap manually.

Certainly, but I would like to be able to deliver a system that does not
generate a device.map by default.

> But first we'd need to figure out what we do with the "set root=xxx"
> backward compatibility hack.  Has it been a while long enough that
> we can remove support for GRUB installs that didn't come with UUID
> support?
> 
> If we don't do anything on grub-mkconfig side and remove device.map, we'll
> end up with things like "set root=(/dev/sda1)" which is not just useless
> but also utterly confusing.

No, I don't think we will. grub-probe is perfectly capable of mapping
/dev/sda1 to (hd0,1) even without device.map; it's just that that
mapping will be solely dependent on device iteration order at the time
you run grub-mkconfig. (As opposed to whatever device iteration order
happened to be the first time you installed GRUB, for the
nearly-everyone who never edited device.map by hand ...)

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden




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