[Bug 1059827] Re: Non trival grub2 installs no longer fit in small embed areas

[C Filorux]

I managed to get this problem by creating a little partition - sda2 in
the list below - trying to make use of that 'unused' space.  This worked
well enough when grub was on a regular partition, but it does not work
when setting up /boot and grub on a LVM.  The fix was to delete the
partition with fdisk and run partprobe.

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048    15624191     7811072   83  Linux
/dev/sda2               3        1727         862+  83  Linux
/dev/sda3        15624192   625142447   304759128    5  Extended
/dev/sda5        15624195   625142447   304759126+  8e  Linux LVM

It would be good for grub to display "there are 3 sectors before the
first partition available for core.img, and we need 65" (or whatever the
case is) rather than to only say that the core image is large - it's not
particularly large.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1059827

Title:
  Non trival grub2 installs no longer fit in small embed areas

Status in “grub2” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  Traditionally the first boot track of the disk was left unpartitioned.
  This area is used to embed the grub2 core.img file.  The size of this
  area used to typically be 62 sectors.  In recent years the typical
  size has changed to 2048 sectors to keep the partitions aligned to a 1
  MiB boundary for performance reasons on SSDs and newer hard disks with
  4KiB sector sizes.  All but the most trivial configurations of grub no
  longer fit in the old 62 sector size embed area.  This results in grub
  complaining that your embed area is unusually small.

  Upstream appears to have no desire to support such configurations, so
  this is unlikely to be fixed, but I will leave this bug report open
  for now.  The workaround for the problem is to repartition the disk
  with modern partitioning tools that will align partitions to 1MiB,
  thus leaving 2048 sectors for the embed area.

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