On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 07:20:19PM +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
On Thu, 15.05.14 18:13, Matthew Garrett (mjg59(a)srcf.ucam.org) wrote:
> Basically. There's a bunch of places that would need to be changed, and
> doing it meaningfully involves doing that across multiple distributions.
> I mean, we *could*, but it's a pain.
Well, thankfully the boot loader is a giant pale of chaos
anyway... Also, we kinda have experience with correcting these kind of
things cross-distro thee days...
Yeah, I'm not saying that this isn't worth fixing, but adopting the spec
in Fedora right now is more than just changing the way we write boot
entries.
> > Humm, what? the spec is used (in its gummiboot
implementaiton) everyday
> > on macs, not sure what you are referring to.
>
> The bootloader needs to be on an HFS+ partition to appear in the OS X
> boot preferences.
dunno. gummiboot appears to work fine to cross boot between osx and
linux. It will automatically discover macos installations even, so
everything should be totally fine...
I'm talking about the menu in the preferences pane inside OS X. The
spec's requirement that we use VFAT would break that.
> Then we have configuration split over two completely different
formats.
> It's kind of unappealing.
Nope. Because the chainload/memcheck stuff never changes after you
installed the boot loader once. The kernel stuff changes all the
time... This means the first distro (the one that owns the boot loader)
has to create the chanload/memcheck config once, and from then one
everything else is just done via BLS snippets, and all the distros can
drop things to the right place without ever touching the original
chainload/memcheck stuff...
Unless the user ever installs another OS which doesn't implement this
spec, which right now is basically all of them.
Note that the chainload thing is a hack for MBR systems. On EFI boot
loaders like gummiboot actually automatically discover windows and
macosx and add it to its menu, not requiring any manual config for that.
Autodiscovery makes it impossible to pass additional options to other
bootloaders. I don't think we care that much in general, but some users
may have requirements for it. It'd be nice to have a common format to
express that.
--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59(a)srcf.ucam.org