[arch-general] Grub and GPT partition labels

[Gerhard Brauer]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 11:00:33AM -0500, Aaron Griffin wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 5:09 AM, Gerhard Brauer <gerhard.brauer at web.de> wrote:
> >
> >  Ok, i've filed 2 feature request to maybe solve these problem.
> >  #9864, #9865
> 
> But, it looks like we already have a new grub package. sigh

(Sorry for not so good english) ;-)

I saw your answers and discussions also in arch-devel. I agree to keep
stable things stable, but also life goes on.
Grub's great benefit over lilo is its flexibility, but therefor grub
must known any partition scheme and filesystem where it should find the
kernels. GPT/EFI is meanwhile a standard (i doesn't thought on the Mac
users by my request), we support it also in our kernels.

I also agree that not most of the users cry "hurray" when gpt is
supported but devices/arrays where one needs partitions beyond 2TB is
not so far "feature dreams" as for ~10 years. Buy a bunch of SATA-HDs
and a HW-Raid-Controller and you're "in buisiness".
But for those who needs this we could provide a installation procedure
without an error ("I coudn't install Arch, grub throws an error").

Looking over other distributions i see no harm when using grub with a
gpt-patch. And it's "only" in testing, test it.

If you devs say: no, we dont't want to apply this; no problem, it was a
feature request. I assume that someone who benefits at the moment from
this patch also has the expirience to solve it an other way:
* use Lilo if want a bootloader straight after installation
* use a external boot medium for the first boot and then build grub from
abs with the patch or from AUR, it's done in 5 minutes.

But if 99% of our users never see anything good (or bad!) with a so
patched grub - and the 1% users benefit from it - then i would like to
see it in Arch.

Gerhard


-- 
Never use a running system...