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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

#61

Post by tuna74 »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #41
c0l0 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... can you really fault software that has "Grand" and "Unified" right there in its name for trying to be just that? The number of systems supported by GRUB is really impressive, the number of special-sauce features supported (filesystems, RAID levels, snapshots, etc.) downright staggering. And if you don't like it, there's plenty of alternative, simpler options with a narrowere focus. I use systemd-boot on most non-…

I think it's fair to wonder, if the job is that varied, then was it ever the correct design approach in the first place to presume to ever be able to predict and handle the unpredictable infinite permutations? This is init vs systemd. 50 years ago, they could not predict all the crazy infinite things a unix system would want to do. And yet they made a system that handled it all possible needs by knowing enough to avo…

"And it still works. Systemd did not need to come along to fix some deficiency, it just came along anyway because for every wise engineer there are 10 clever engineers, and after 50 years of rapid growth the population of linux admins is less than 1% people that know how to reject a shiny new bad idea and 99% kids who do not. Plus of course a few huge businesses who just want that kind of appliance system for their own business reasons and don't care one turd about engineering or empowering the end user or anything like that outside of their own walls."

If you want to you can always run something like Devuan. You don't have to shit on other projects or people to run the software that you want.

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

#62

Post by Brian_K_White »

tuna74 wrote: post #61
Brian_K_White wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's fair to wonder, if the job is that varied, then was it ever the correct design approach in the first place to presume to ever be able to predict and handle the unpredictable infinite permutations? This is init vs systemd. 50 years ago, they could not predict all the crazy infinite things a unix system would want to do. And yet they made a system that handled it all possible needs by knowing enough to avo…

"And it still works. Systemd did not need to come along to fix some deficiency, it just came along anyway because for every wise engineer there are 10 clever engineers, and after 50 years of rapid growth the population of linux admins is less than 1% people that know how to reject a shiny new bad idea and 99% kids who do not. Plus of course a few huge businesses who just want that kind of appliance system for their o…

Sure if I want, I can indeed run anything at all, including that. What's that got to do with anything?

The observation of majority linux and systemd and unix design principles remains a fact regardless what I happen to run. Even if the only thing I happen to run is freebsd which has no such problem. "you can run ..." is both true and irrelevant, doesn't change a thing.

Another thing I can do if I want to, is observe something and describe what I see, even if someone like you doesn't agree, and has no better way to handle that than to suggest the speaker should do something else besides speak their mind rather than actually argue or counter any of the points. (Everyone including me already knows the sales pitch for systemd, it's unlikely you have any argument that I don't already know, this is very much a religious issue at this point, as in there is no actual changing of anyone's minds on either side)

You like systemd and don't like hearing blasphemy criticizing it? Tough shit!

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

#63

Post by E39M5S62 »

magicalhippo wrote: post #46
userbinator wrote: post #2

It's far from clear how grub works. IMHO it contains enough functionality (filesystem access, user interface, program execution, etc.) that it could already be considered an OS itself.

> it contains enough functionality [...] that it could already be considered an OS itself. That's what ZFSBootMenu[1] is, an OS to start the OS. And as sibling points out, if you're using EFI you got an OS booting your OS booting your OS... [1]: https://www.zfsbootmenu.org/

I originally wrote ZFSBootMenu as a reaction to how awful Grub is. I was hacking on the Grub scripts and hitting all sorts of limitations that were just awful to work around (or not possible at all). I used Grub to chain load early versions of ZBM before I had the whole UEFI application build process worked out.

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

#64

Post by raggi »

jorvi wrote: post #5
raggi wrote: 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…

> 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.

systemd’s efforts in the boot path are very welcome, they’re much better. Sadly as others have noted, a great many distros are still using grub.

To clarify a bit too, as it seems it may not have been clear: grub was never run or installed inside a fuchsia system, I was building disk images from Linux hosts.

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

#65

Post by userbinator »

jorvi wrote: post #5
raggi wrote: 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…

> 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.

Isn't rEFInd a Hackintosh thing? That's the context I hear about it in, anyway.

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

#66

Post by raggi »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #40
raggi wrote: 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.

I threw the code away again in the end. We didn't have that much of a need for non-UEFI targets, but I was experimenting at the time with booting on some cloud x64 machines that lacked UEFI support.

If I had to do it again, I'd probably just write a loader myself. It took about the same amount of time to fight grub as it would have done to smush together a basic GPT / FAT / jump chain.

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

#67

Post by nineteen999 »

nurettin wrote: post #39
pjmlp wrote: post #11

I miss LILO, life was song much simpler, to this day I barely understand grub beyond basic kernel parameters.

20 something years ago, LILO was default on many distros and you had a choice. Not sure how grub took over.

> Not sure how grub took over.

Flexibility.

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

#68

Post by a3f »

rcxdude wrote: post #50
andrewstuart wrote: post #8

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.

Grub is just unnecessarily complicated. Simpler options exist (even ones with the same level of flexibility, though I am most familiar with embedded options there: Something like barebox shows an alternative approach that could be applied to desktop: basically just make a shell environment in your bootloader to script your more complex requirements). But 90% of users nowadays can just use systemd-boot.

barebox can be compiled as EFI payload and used on Desktop systems. The main impediment is packaging it for the OS and scripting the hooks that would write e.g. bootloader spec files on kernel updates.

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

#69

Post by lathiat »

lathiat wrote: post #15
pjmlp wrote: post #11

I miss LILO, life was song much simpler, to this day I barely understand grub beyond basic kernel parameters.

LI LI LI LI LI LI LI LI LI LI LI LI LI LI LI LI LI LI LI LI LI LI LI LI LI LI LI

-2 points, yikes.. not sure if if that's 3 angry people that had to deal with LILO not working or 3 people thinking I was just spamming who never had the pleasure of dealing with LILO.
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