Re: [PATCH v0] Require human interaction to go to normal shell if grub.cfg has a problem

[Andrey Borzenkov]

On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 12:16 AM, Jonathan McCune <address@hidden> wrote:
> Replying here instead of the install_c thread to try to keep it clean.  In
> response to:
>
> On Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 11:18 AM, Andrey Borzenkov <address@hidden>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 11:09 PM, Jonathan McCune <address@hidden>
>> wrote:
>> > On Sat, Nov 9, 2013 at 4:51 AM, Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko
>> > <address@hidden> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Hello, all. install_c is feature complete and I intent to make it
>> >> upstream unless issues are raised until 16 Nov. It's available under
>> >> http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/grub.git/log/?h=phcoder/install_c
>> >
>> >
>> > I just realized that the option --grub-mkimage is now accepted silently
>> > without having any effect in
>> > util/grub-install-common.c:grub_install_parse(). This makes it no longer
>> > feasible to easily wrap the mkimage command.  While most of the
>> > meaningful
>> > reasons to wrap grub-mkimage have now been added to grub-install, I've
>> > run
>> > into something I'm struggling to work around:  How do I add custom
>> > contents
>> > to a load.cfg, since util/grub-install.c seems to unconditionally
>> > grub_util_unlink(load_cfg)?
>> >
>>
>> Could you provide examples of your grub.cfg usage? I think we need to
>> have more real-life use cases to understand better how and when it is
>> used.
>
>
> The real life use case is a headless / unattended environment where it is
> better to reboot than to present a console prompt if there is some kind of
> GRUB problem, since the machine will just sit there until somebody or
> something notices that it never booted up.
>

I still do not quite understand how rebooting can fix the problem. The
only case it may happen is when you have intermittent network issues
where grub fails to read some file.

I have a feeling that you attempt to paper over some problem outside of grub.