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It's far from clear how grub package updates work on Ubuntu

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Re: It's far from clear how grub package updates work on Ubuntu

#31
post #26

So assuming your machine supports UEFI, what are the common use cases that systemd-boot would not support, requiring you to use grub? Encrypted boot partition I'd guess? I tried that once with grub, but it was unbearingly slow, because grub did not / could not use modern x86 extensions to do the decryption. So not a common use case either, maybe a desirable one.

[deleted]

Re: It's far from clear how grub package updates work on Ubuntu

#32
post #14
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole thing seems like an accident of history that no one wants to fix I can’t really speak to Fuchsia systems, but a lot (most?) Linux desktop distros use stub or systemd-boot bootloading these days. And if you want to get fancy, there’s rEFInd.

Actually, with refind being a thing, I'm not sure why grub is still a thing. Also why MS' bootmgr stuff is still a flaming pile of junk. Edit: And why MS has never given us a way to dictate where it installs its junk and/or to not install its junk!!!!!!

This is the reason why I disable all non windows drives in my machine before letting any Microsoft installer do its things.

Re: It's far from clear how grub package updates work on Ubuntu

#33
post #30
post #26

So assuming your machine supports UEFI, what are the common use cases that systemd-boot would not support, requiring you to use grub? Encrypted boot partition I'd guess? I tried that once with grub, but it was unbearingly slow, because grub did not / could not use modern x86 extensions to do the decryption. So not a common use case either, maybe a desirable one.

> So not a common use case either, maybe a desirable one. it's a literal checkbox install option on Ubuntu at least a few versions back (i'm not up to date), so I wouldn't call it uncommon.

For root partition sure. But for boot? Normally when you choose an encrypted root partition you get an extra boot partition without encryption. Unless that has changed rather recently.

Re: It's far from clear how grub package updates work on Ubuntu

#34

One of the areas of Linux that I slunk away from defeated is understanding grub and the boot process in general for Linux. Either I am stopid or it is stopidly complex or both.

This.. For a moderate somewhat prosumerish user like me, it's these kind of stuff which is why can't have nice things. It used to be the ./configure, make, make install hell which modern package managers and distributions seem to have fixed for most software, now it's this.

Re: It's far from clear how grub package updates work on Ubuntu

#35

One of the areas of Linux that I slunk away from defeated is understanding grub and the boot process in general for Linux. Either I am stopid or it is stopidly complex or both.

The lower you go in the stack, the uglier it gets.

Re: It's far from clear how grub package updates work on Ubuntu

#36
Iirc when I upgraded from ubuntu 22 to 23 grub stopped being able to boot my windows drive. I played around with it for like an hour and it just wouldnt work, so now whenever I want to boot windows I have to use the efi boot menu instead which is a good enough solution that I wont spend more time on the problem.

Re: It's far from clear how grub package updates work on Ubuntu

#37
post #26

So assuming your machine supports UEFI, what are the common use cases that systemd-boot would not support, requiring you to use grub? Encrypted boot partition I'd guess? I tried that once with grub, but it was unbearingly slow, because grub did not / could not use modern x86 extensions to do the decryption. So not a common use case either, maybe a desirable one.

I shifted to using systemd-boot as default years ago and don't look back.

Granted, prior to Debian Bookworm I had to roll my own initramfs- and kernel-hooks, but there were blog posts and I didn't need to develop them.

I even tried directly booting into Linux EFISTUB, but thats uselessly annoying compared to a proper bootloader.

Re: It's far from clear how grub package updates work on Ubuntu

#38
post #9
post #7

> It's far from clear how grub package updates work on Ubuntu It's far from clear how grub works, uprade or otherwise, period. Much less how to configure it or install it. Sendmail.cf or jq level configuration language in terms of obscurity. Cryptic error messages the severity of which is impossible to infer (actual impact being from no impact whatsoever to my computer won't boot anymore). Not my favorite piece of Li…

It's pretty well documented with a pretty simple configuration language (if you already use a bourne shell (and you probably do), you already know how GRUB's syntax works). I guess reading the manual isn't popular these days, but GRUB has a complete one that explains it all.

I just want to boot my system and get on with my life. Grub is exactly the sort of thing I aggressively don't want to spend time on.

Re: It's far from clear how grub package updates work on Ubuntu

#40
post #4

Grubs install process is a complete disaster. I went to use it to boot Fuchsia on bios systems at one point, when Zircon still supported multiboot chaining. The "install" scripts and so on are all horribly broken, and extremely badly behaved in terms of grabbing arbitrary stuff from the environment that has nothing to do with your desired target system. Using them for anything other than modifying the current host sy…

Fwiw I've had pretty good experiences with getting LLMs to do the gruntwork of porting Bash to Python in my case. It's a translation task after all.
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