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Re-enabling os-prober for live images?



Hello Debian Developers

Since the grub 2.06 upload, os-prober is now disabled by default. This means that other operating systems are no longer detected and added to grub by default in Debian 12.

This makes some sense, since mounting foreign filesystems and reading files on them, extracting some text and using it as variable in shell scripts could well be dangerous if those foreign filesystems are infected with malware that takes advantage of this.

However, I'm not sure this is a good default for Debian Live at this time. Many people who install from Debian Live are dual-boot users, and currently, they'll have to do an additional step that's relatively easy for any system administrator, but far more complicated than any other step to configure Debian at that point (edit a file as root and then run update-grub, and, they'll need to know that they need to do this).

Julien posted about this on ubuntu-devel a while back too:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2021-December/041769.html

I haven't followed further on to which solution they went with, but since it's so late in the development cycle, wouldn't it make sense to enable os-prober for Live systems for Debian 12, and then look at some of the better solutions (like only probing at install time, and keeping a cached results for grub) for Debian 13?

-Jonathan


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