On Thu, Apr 14, 2022 at 08:59:28PM +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:
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.
Thanks for testing!
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?
Interesting, it's probably because the eltoritio.img doesn't include a
config. I'd need to figure out what to include that would exclude
floppies but keep it working everywhere else. I'll ask around and see if
there is a generic solution, but I'd rather err on the side of
unplugging the floppy drive at this point ;)
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.
I remember a bug about slow booting a while back, where someone
complained that CHS settings in parted were making their boot slow. It
ends up grub2 uses INT13 to get the disk geometry, and uses that info
for the buffer size. So if the BIOS is reporting something small it
might take longer to boot.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2024261
Brian
--
Brian C. Lane (PST8PDT) - weldr.io - lorax - parted - pykickstart