Hi Brian,
On 4/14/22 01:52, Brian C. Lane wrote:
A huge thanks to Thomas Schmitt for posting xorrisofs arguments :)
Here is a lorax PR switching to grub2 for BIOS and changing the layout
of the iso as described in his post:
https://github.com/weldr/lorax/pull/1226
And a Fedora 36 iso:
https://bcl.fedorapeople.org/boot-grub2-f36.iso
I've tested this with:
- qemu bios -cdrom
- qemu uefi -cdrom
- qemu bios -hda
- qemu uefi -hda
- USB stick on uefi PC hardware with SB off
- USB stick on UEFI PC hardware with SB on
- USB stick on Apple hardware UEFI
2010 Macbook Air and 2012 Macbook Pro
- Media test works on all of the above
I have not tested it on CD or DVD physical media. I have a stack of
blank discs but apparently have unplugged all my drives to use their
SATA ports for SSDs :)
Thank you so much for working on this.
I've dd-ed the boot-grub2-f36.iso to an USB stick and successfully
tested it on the following machines:
1. Siemens PC with an i5-2400 with 8G RAM
2. Fujitsu-Siemens PC with a Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4 Ghz dual core with 4G RAM
3. Dell Latitude E6400 (core 2 duo) with 4G RAM
4. Acer One AO532 netbook with a N450 + 2G RAM
The image booted fine on all 4 machines, so from a machine
compatibility pov this looks good to me.
There were 2 minor issues with machine 2:
1. After the "Welcome to GRUB" text the 3.5" floppy drive
was searched repeatedly before showing the grub bootmenu.
It also took like 5-10 seconds to show the menu.
I guess that grub is using a minimal grub.cfg which is looking
for the actual grub.cfg based on the partition uuid or some such
and it is also checking the floppy drive. I wonder if we can
tweak grub.cfg on the bootmedia to not do this?
2. Booting the kernel once making the selection in the menu
takes forever (I walked away after 1 minute). But it does boot
eventually and I just tried with a Fedora 36 nightly, thus using
syslinux and the same happens. I believe that the USB stack of the
BIOS on this machine simply is terribly slow and reading the
big kernel + ramdisk files one sector at a time. So there is
nothing we can do here. Since this also happens with syslinux
this is not something to worry about.
Regards,
Hans