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

[Phillip Susi]

You're not making sense.  2 MB is 4096 sectors.  The default start
location for the last several years has been sector 2048, or 1 MB, which
leaves plenty of room for the core to fit.

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Foundations Bugs, which is subscribed to grub2 in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1059827

Title:
  Non trivial 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.

  Another workaround is to setup a simple ext4 /boot partition rather
  than try to boot directly from raid or lvm or btrfs.

To manage notifications about this bug go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1059827/+subscriptions