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

[Mate Kukri]

grub-install absolutely seems to work on start=2048 MBR disks in my
experience.

Also current Ubuntu BIOS setups use GPT with a BIOS boot partition which
gives plenty of space for GRUB core.

** Changed in: grub2 (Ubuntu)
       Status: Triaged => Fix Released

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

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

Status in grub2 package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released

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.

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