GRUB 2 now default for new installations

[John Moser]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Luke L<lukehasnoname at gmail.com> wrote:
> How many of these things are actually going to make it into Karmic? A
> dynamically sized swap file? GRUB 2 residing on its own partition,
> etc? These things sound good.
>

GRUB2 on its own partition is silly.  Like having a separate /boot.
What problem are you trying to solve?  If you hose /boot, you need an
install CD to repair; if you separate /boot from / you're "safer"
because /boot isn't mounted, but if you hose / you need an install CD
to repair.

Every argument for putting Grub or the kernel on a separate partition
has been based around the idea that these files are somehow more
important than, say, /bin/sh; the kernel is no more important than
/bin/sh, because init will fail without a working shell to run rc.
Recovery tools?  You mean "insert the install CD so I can rebuild your
totally damaged / partition"?  Or will it automagically configure
networking and download all the packages for a fresh base install?
And if we damage the separate partition, then what?

As for dynamic swap, we need a way to suspend-to-swap-file such that
if there's not enough we just create one.  We also need swapd fixed,
because it's rather crappy (doesn't free up swap files, doesn't
coalesce i.e. I can't use 16MB swap files and max 512M swap across 8
files by having 64MB files created after 4 16MB files exist and then
starting to free 16MB files when I'm creating the 7th swap file, etc).


> Also, would a dedicated GRUB2 parition be able to exist on LVM/raid?
> Just curious.
>

Who cares?