[arch-general] grub/grub2 final - some questions

[mike cloaked]

Subject: Re: [arch-dev-public] grub/grub2 final
On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 8:51 PM, Ronald van Haren <pressh at gmail.com> wrote:

> I was about to post a similar message...
>
> Anyway, I was planning to drop support of grub1. There has been no
> upstream for a long time and all newer features are patched in or
> require additional patches. I don't see a need to have it in [extra]
> as grub-legacy. No problem uploading it to AUR so people can continue
> to use it if they want, although you need i686 to build it so that
> could be the only reason to keep it in [extra] for a bit...
>
> I've seen no major breakages in grub2 since beta2 iirc. Upstream
> development has been going towards stability in recent betas and I
> would consider it stable at the moment: there were no real bug reports
> in the bugtracker for the last few months.
>
> I'd like to move 2.00 to [core] via [testing] when it is released,
> letting the grub-bios (atm grub2-bios) replace the old grub package.
> Adding an install message and a news item is probably a good idea at
> the time.
>
> I'll be pushing grub2 rc1 to [testing] in a moment if you want to give
> it a try. Final 2.00 release should be in one of the next days.

I am slightly confused by some of the options that will become
available once grub2 becomes the supported package in [core].

For someone who currently has hardware without EFI firmware (or any
choice of switching in the BIOS menus), and boots via BIOS-grub- and
with MBR and conventional partitions with an x86_64 arch system - then
will it still be possible to boot with the only change being to move
from grub to grub2 (using grub2-bios)?   I am certainly confused about
how UEFI fits in with that scenario.  Would it be the same for someone
running as above with 32 bit packages only?

For a system based on hardware without EFI so that there is no option
in the "BIOS" to switch from BIOS to EFI is there some magic that
needs to happen for the BIOS to boot and then load UEFI code and
support GPT partitions?

Maybe I am the only one who is confused about these linked changes to
BIOS/UEFI grub/grub2 and the system partitioning MBR/GPT?  Is there a
good clear link to an explanation of how this all fits together and
what the options will be?

I guess that in the future hardware will increasingly be purchased
which has UEFI enabled by default (and at some point BIOS will
presumably vanish altogether) with huge hard drive capacities, but at
the moment many systems purchased in the past decade and still in use
are not UEFI based, so the choices available to users need to be clear
as grub2 and new options and code are developed for the boot process.

Thanks in advance.

-- 
mike c