GRUB update borks Debian testing

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Jamon Camisso <jamon.camisso-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org>

Thanks for your informative response.

| I usually always run update-grub when a new kernel comes around, either
| grub or grub2. No change there for me.

Me too, but indirectly.  I get kernel updates from my distro.  The
installation process updates the grub config file(s) as part of that.

When the LILO -> Grub transition happened, I was using custom kernels,
or at least thought I was still going to do that.  So the issue was
more significant.

Custom kernels are much less mainstream now.  So the issue is mostly
moot.

There was another advantage of Grub back then that I forgot to
mention.  LILO used the BIOS to do disk operations.  Some BIOSes I had
to work with could not address beyond the first 8.5G of disk.  But
Grub used native disk I/O and could boot from partitions past 8.5G

Thankfully, that issue too is dead.  I think.  I admit variations of
it seem to come back once in a while.

There may be another issue.  LILO may only be 16-bit and may only be
able to load things into the first 640K.  I don't know.  That might
not be easy to fix since BIOS calls may have those limitations.

So: I wonder if we should move back to LILO!

| The emacs key bindings for grub2 are annoying, grub was much easier to
| edit from the grub shell.

Didn't old grub use EMACS bindings (those are what my fingers know)?

| > + the loadable modules must be good for something but that isn't
| >   self-evident.
| 
| It's certainly handy for a hackintosh. grub2 easily passes arguments
| directly to the xnu kernel, even checks for sleep/resume before booting
| it. Very cool how they've tried to be filesystem and operating system
| agnostic, while at the same time supporting very operating system
| specific options[1], e.g.

I guess what you are saying that modules allow bloat without a
proportionately increased RAM footprint.  And that the GRUB2 folks
have been prolific.

I'd like GRUB2 to support netbooting (apparently it has lost old
Grub's capability).

I'd like GRUB to be suitable for CD and DVD booting.  I don't know
what the issues are, but all the bootable CDs I've noticed uses
syslinux / isolinux.  I actually have a bootable GRUB CD to use in
emergencies.
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