[Bug 1046890] Re: [FFe] grub2 2.00

[Colin Watson]

My preliminary packages are here:

  https://launchpad.net/~cjwatson/+archive/grub

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Title:
  [FFe] grub2 2.00

Status in “grub2” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  I'd like to bump quantal from grub2 1.99 to 2.00.

  Firstly, I apologise for this being relatively late.  For one reason
  or another I was a bit short on motivation to get it sorted out
  earlier, not to mention short on time; but neither of those are a
  problem any more, this is now a very high priority for me, and I can
  devote considerable attention to sorting out any regressions.

  GRUB 2.00 is a significant release, and contains quite a number of
  feature changes.  It is worth pointing out that we have backported
  many of these to 1.99 or originated some of the patches (particularly
  various filesystems, submenus, EDID video mode selection, and grub-
  mount), and by now our 1.99 packaging is a Frankenstein collection of
  backports.  Between that and being a year behind, upstream is pretty
  much uninterested in going anywhere near it by now, and my mailbox is
  full of bugs where people report that 2.00 fixed things for them.  I'm
  keen to bring us up to something more current and less extensively
  patched.  Furthermore, there are several features that are important
  and impractical to backport.  These include:

   * USB EHCI (some devices aren't accessible by 1.99 due to the lack of this)
   * EFI serial
   * Network stack for (among other platforms) EFI, which should permit EFI netbooting (an important feature requested by some partners for 12.10)
   * LUKS support
   * A gfxmenu theme, which should help to eliminate the reasons people feel they need to use BURG (I don't know if I'll enable this by default in quantal, but it will be available)
   * GDB stub and support script, including backtrace on crash on i386
   * Faster device scanning

  Here's the debian/changelog fragment describing the new upstream
  release:

    * New upstream release.
      - Add LUKS and GELI encrypted disk support (closes: #463107).
      - Lazy scanning to avoid accessing devices which aren't really used.
        This avoids boot delay due to slow device scanning (closes: #549905,
        #550015, #550083, #564252, #595059, #632408).
      - Don't override more informative errors when loading kernel/initrd
        (closes: #551630).
      - Support 4K-sector NTFS (closes: #567728).
      - Unify grub-mkrescue interface on powerpc with that on other
        architectures (closes: #570119).
      - Fix infinite recursion in gettext when translation fails (closes:
        #611537, #612454, #616487, #619618, #626853, #643608).
      - Add more missing quotes to grub-mkconfig (closes: #612417).
      - Import gnulib change to fix argp_help segfault with help filter
        (closes: #612692).
      - Support %1$d syntax in grub_printf (closes: #630647).
      - Use write-combining MTRR to speed up video with buggy BIOSes (closes:
        #630926).
      - Remove multiboot header from PXE images to avoid confusing ipxe
        (closes: #635877).
      - Fix crash when attempting to install to a non-BIOS disk (closes:
        #637208).
      - Fix handling of grub-mkrescue --xorriso= option (closes: #646788).
      - Use umask rather than chmod to create grub.cfg.new to avoid insecure
        grub.cfg (closes: #654599).
      - Improve font installation logic (closes: #654645).
      - Add grub-probe info documentation (closes: #666031).
      - Don't crash on canonicalize_file_name failure in grub-probe (closes:
        #677211).

  I'd like to call out the lazy scanning and gettext infinite recursion
  items in particular.  While I've had enough on my plate with going
  through the bugs in Debian to go through the (on average rather less
  helpful and not curated by upstream) bugs in Ubuntu, these fix a large
  number of delays and hard-to-diagnose crashes, in the latter case
  especially on complex RAID/LVM/etc. setups.  I would be lying if I
  said I didn't expect there to be some regressions, but I think we can
  cover the worst of that with advance testing in Debian and in a PPA,
  and I should certainly be able to deal with anything that's serious
  and widespread.

  I don't yet have a full build log or similar, since I'm still dealing
  with merging this into Debian experimental, and will then proceed to
  work on the Ubuntu merge.  My testing in Debian has been encouraging
  so far, only needing to fix a few comparatively trivial problems
  encountered in my plain, LVM, LVM+crypto, and RAID-1 test VMs.

  I'll attach ChangeLog (warning, large!) and NEWS diffs.

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