Re: Grub

[Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au>]

On Mon, 5 Nov 2001 12:15, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 05, 2001 at 01:29:34AM -0900, Ethan Benson wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 05, 2001 at 11:18:48AM +0100, Michael R. Schwarzbach wrote:
> > > Another thought:
> > >
> > >
> > > Why not change the default bootloader to grub in debian?
> >
> > because boot-floppies are not going to change bootloaders.  this has
> > been discussed already, its no longer open to debate.

I am not going to comment on that.

> There must be an option for GRUB, as GRUB is the only boot loader
> powerful enough to boot the Hurd.

There is an option.  It's just not the default.  However again I'm not 
interested into getting into that debate.  If the decision went the other way 
I still wouldn't get involved.

> So, the Debian boot-floppies will support GRUB, at least for the Hurd.
> If Debian GNU/Linux is going to ship with a crippled boot loader for
> all eternity, that's another decision.  I would hope not so.

Does GRUB work on anything other than i386?  The Debian package is an i386 
only package.

When GRUB can be used to boot two or three other architectures you will have 
a much stronger case for it, if we could use the same boot loader on all 
architectures it would be great!

There are still quite a few features of LILO which GRUB lacks (AFAIK).

I believe that it is impossible to easily install grub in a RAID-1 setup.

I believe that there is nothing directly equivalent to the -R option for 
LILO, this allows you to configure lilo to boot a kernel once and then revert 
to the default.  So if you have remote control of the power (or can phone 
someone who only knows enough to push reset) then you could put in a new 
kernel last on the list and then run "lilo -R new-kernel ; reboot", if after 
a few minutes your machine is not online again you can get reset pressed 
which gets the old kernel again.  I know I could do the same thing with grub 
by editing menu.lst with sed, but this works AFTER the kernel has mounted 
root (which may be too late).

Grub totally lacks serial console support!!!

Also I have needs for three different types of setup, booting from hard 
drive, and booting from two different versions of the Tulip driver (the grub 
Tulip driver seems buggy - unlike the kernel drivers I can't have one driver 
work with all my cards).  Using grub alone would require three versions of 
grub because the Debian package of grub doesn't allow easily specifying 
different files to the grub installer (I suppose that I could force it if I 
knew grub better, but for me it's easier to remove one and install another).  
So on one machine I have LILO and two different alternating versions of grub.

Does grub support XFS and JFS yet?

I agree that grub is the way of the future, it has some great features.  But 
there are many very useful things that LILO does which grub can't do.  Also 
note that I did not try to make the above list comprehensive, I just listed 
things as they came to mind.


Please don't take this as some sort of "grub vs LILO war" thing.  I am using 
grub for some things that I do, and it is working quite well.  But I can't 
use it more because it lacks features.  If these features get added to grub 
then I'll cease using LILO.

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