On 11/20/2010 05:27 AM, Pierre Schmitz wrote:

Hi,

while reviewing the core rebuild list I wondered if we should think about chaining our default boot loader. Note: that wont affect existing setups and people will still be able to use whatever they like.

ATM. we have grub1 in core/base and install that by default. The problem is that this project is virtually dead for a long time now and also not available on x86_64. Technically it has to be in the multilib repo.

Grub2 is currently in extra. Upstream development is still in flux. Imho its quite heavy and complex.

An alternative successor would be extlinux from the syslinux package. It's very simple, easy to configure, actively maintained and reliable. Sure, it only supports booting from ext* and btrfs afaik but to be honest, if you use any other FS you should have a separate /boot even when using grub.

Summing up my suggestion for some time in the future would be: * move extlinux/syslinux to core/base * move grub1 to extra/multilib and remove it from base group * keep grub2 in extra * maybe also move lilo to extra * of course keep all of them on the install cd

What do you think about this? At some point it might not be sane/possible to keep grub1 as our default boot loader.

Greetings,

Pierre

I was thinking about how we could integrate extlinux into the installer and have suggested creating an additional package called extlinux. This package would would include an example config and a few *.c32 file needed to make the config work. As a result, the installer would just have to modify the example config and run extlinux --install /boot/syslinux. As an added bonus, it makes things easier for the end user (/boot/syslinux doesn't need to be created and *.c32 files don't need to be copied to /boot/syslinux). I have all the juicy details and an explanation here: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/21766 ~pyther