Feature Suggestion -- Grub should look for arch specific grub.cfg

[Mroczek, Joseph T]

Yes, I tried that. I could change $prefix to get it to look for grub.cfg in a different location. But to find the modules had to I rearrange all the files on the server so the modules would be in the correct place relative to grub.cfg. I tried using memdisk to solve the finding the modules issue, but when memdisk was present the network stack did not load. I can hack around the issue, but the default setup has all architectures looking at the same grub.cfg and only that single grub.cfg. In my case, I have to support 3 architectures today (i386-pc, i386-efi, x86_64-efi) and likely two more in the future (arm, ia64-efi). It would great if the default behavior was architecture aware in locating configuration files.

~joe

-----Original Message-----
From: Phillip Susi [mailto:psusi at ubuntu.com] 
Sent: Thursday, February 06, 2014 6:33 AM
To: Mroczek, Joseph T; ubuntu-devel-discuss at lists.ubuntu.com
Subject: Re: Feature Suggestion -- Grub should look for arch specific grub.cfg

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You know you can specify the config file to use when you build the grub net image right?

On 2/5/2014 3:13 PM, Mroczek, Joseph T wrote:
> Hello:
> 
> Please let me know if this is not the correct place to make this 
> suggestion/request. First time mailing here.
> 
> Description: Grub should look in architecture specific directory for 
> grub.cfg. eg /boot/grub/x86_64-efi/grub.cfg Second best would be to 
> look for architecture specific filename eg grub-x86_64-efi.cfg.
> 
> Rational: When setting up a network boot server, it is may be 
> desirable to have different grub.cfg files for different 
> architectures. This allows setting different defaults and images.
> This is already done for module loading, just not for the config file. 
> My preference would be to check for architecture specific file first 
> (root)$prefix/$arch/grub.cfg then fall back to the current path of 
> (root)$prefix/grub.cfg.
> 
> Impact: Many architectures cannot share boot files. Eg. X86_64-efi and 
> i386-efi. To deal with this scenario, it seems to require much 
> conditional scripting in grub.cfg or jiggling $prefix and file 
> locations to trick different builds of grub to load from different 
> locations. This is not a big deal when booting from a hard drive since 
> the architecture is known. This becomes a big deal with network 
> booting from a shared location. It seems to me that this would also be 
> useful for USB/CD boot to support more architectures in a single media 
> device.
> 
> Thank you for any attention you can pay this matter.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Joe M.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

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