Re: Several ideas about grub2.

[Seth Goldberg]

On Sep 28, 2010, at 3:42 PM, Dmitry Ilyin <address@hidden> wrote:

> 1. Implementation of some progress bar for file reading
> 
> Loading files from slow flash or network can sometimes take up to several 
> minutes (Linux initramfs could 
> be about 100Mb). And i'm thinking about some progress meter for file loading. 
> It could be print dot per 
> megabyte, percent or 34/76Mb style or like this |#######------------|.
> Looks like it should be build into grub_disk_read procedue in kern/disk.c or 
> grub_file_read in kern/file.c
> Maybe you could give me some hints about best way to do this.


  Yes!  This is some thing we added to Legacy GRUB in Solaris and it's 
something sorely missing-- along with hooks for display of a bar graph in the 
theme subsystem.

  --S



> 
> 2. Basic text editor
> 
> Is it possible to make basic text editor as grub2 module. I'm looking at "ed" 
> http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.html It will be very usefull to edit text 
> files (grub.cfg for example) 
> without booting os. Or there is no write support in filesystem drivers? Maybe 
> hex editor?
> 
> 3. Installing on loop devices
> 
> grub-install fails to work on loop devices. Partition detection doesn't work 
> on loop devices, but you can 
> use kpartx. For example we have /dev/loop0, using fdisk we create 2 
> partitions on this image, kpartx -a 
> /dev/loop0 will map partitions to /dev/mapper/loop0p1 and /dev/mapper/loop0p2 
> which you can format and 
> mount, but grub-install will fail (there is no bios drives for them?).
> No kernel partition detecion for loop devices is serious problem. Why kernel 
> cannot create /dev/loop0p1 
> and /dev/loop0p2 like with real hdds? FreeBSD's md's doesn't have this 
> problem and work like normal disks 
> with partitions. But this is not related to grub.
> What is the best way to fix installing on loop devices? Fixing grub-probe or 
> grub-install to not using 
> grub-probe when it cannot work and hardcode (hd0) prefix for loop devices?
> 
> Using grub-mkimage and grub-setup manually works.
> 
> 
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