[gentoo-dev] Documentation for sys-boot/grub:2

[gentoo-dev] Documentation for sys-boot/grub:2

[Mike Gilbert]

I believe the only thing keeping GRUB 2 masked is a lack of
"documentation". By this, I assume people are referring to the
handbook.

I have created a very minimal "quick start" guide that could be
adapted for the handbook. It relies on the grub2-mkconfig command
auto-detecting most things, which actually works pretty well.

http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GRUB2_Quick_Start

scarabeus created a guide a while back that goes into slightly more detail:

http://dev.gentoo.org/~scarabeus/grub-2-guide.xml

The wiki also has a longer GRUB2 guide. This goes into some of the
more exotic setups. However, some of it is poorly written and I find
editing it quite tedious.

http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GRUB2

So, my question to the community: what level of documentation do we
want to put in the handbook?

If the intent is just to get people up and running on Gentoo, I think
adapting the quick start guide from the wiki is enough. grub2.info has
a very detailed reference; I think we can refer people to that for
manual/advanced configuration.

Is there any other issue with grub:2 that would keep me from unmasking
(adding keywords) on x86 and amd64? I plan on waiting for the 2.00
release.

Re: [gentoo-dev] Documentation for sys-boot/grub:2

[Maxim Kammerer]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 18:07, Mike Gilbert <floppym@gentoo.org> wrote:
> So, my question to the community: what level of documentation do we
> want to put in the handbook?

I think that the EFI usecase should be well-documented, since EFI is
the reason that many users migrate to GRUB 2.

> Is there any other issue with grub:2 that would keep me from unmasking
> (adding keywords) on x86 and amd64? I plan on waiting for the 2.00
> release.

Note that whereas 1.99 searches for modules in $prefix, 2.00 searches
for them in $prefix/<arch>.

-- 
Maxim Kammerer
Liberté Linux (discussion / support: http://dee.su/liberte-contribute)

[gentoo-dev] Re: Documentation for sys-boot/grub:2

[Duncan]

Maxim Kammerer posted on Tue, 20 Mar 2012 21:31:53 +0200 as excerpted:

> On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 18:07, Mike Gilbert <floppym@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> So, my question to the community: what level of documentation do we
>> want to put in the handbook?
> 
> I think that the EFI usecase should be well-documented, since EFI is the
> reason that many users migrate to GRUB 2.

Currently, you're right.  But consider that we're talking about unmasking 
grub2 to ~arch and ultimately to stable, at which point it should be in 
the handbook and all x86 and amd64 users will be getting it, that won't 
remain the case forever.

>> Is there any other issue with grub:2 that would keep me from unmasking
>> (adding keywords) on x86 and amd64? I plan on waiting for the 2.00
>> release.
> 
> Note that whereas 1.99 searches for modules in $prefix, 2.00 searches
> for them in $prefix/<arch>.

FWIW, the 2.00 betas haven't been entirely smooth for me.  beta0 was 
fine. beta1 would load to grub but would reboot when I tried to boot a 
kernel, so I masked it.  beta2 is getting there, but there's still some 
problems with various interactive commands.  IIRC it was help cat that 
triggered a reboot here, while cat --help (or was it cat -h?) works.  But 
with one of the other commands I tried, it was the reverse, help <command 
worked for it, but <command> --help did nothing (at least it didn't 
trigger a reboot as help cat did).

Assuming those sorts of issues are gone by 2.00 release, it should be a 
reasonable target.  But I'd definitely recommend thorough testing both at 
the maintainer level, and with an elog urging users who have manually 
unmasked it to file any remaining bugs ASAP, before it's unmasked to 
~arch.

Talking about which, should I actively pursue bug filing on it yet?  With 
gentoo, upstream, or both?  If you're actively wanting those bugs now, 
please do put an elog to that effect in the ebuild, and I'll start being 
particular about stuff like help cat working, and filing bugs if it 
doesn't!

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Documentation for sys-boot/grub:2

[Mike Gilbert]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 5:34 PM, Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net> wrote:
> Talking about which, should I actively pursue bug filing on it yet?  With
> gentoo, upstream, or both?  If you're actively wanting those bugs now,
> please do put an elog to that effect in the ebuild, and I'll start being
> particular about stuff like help cat working, and filing bugs if it
> doesn't!
>

By all means, please file your bugs!

I will probably refer you upstream for most of them, so please
register for an account on savannah.gnu.org. If you are reasonably
sure that your issue is not caused by something Gentoo-specific, you
file them upstream immediately.

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Documentation for sys-boot/grub:2

[Maxim Kammerer]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 23:34, Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net> wrote:
> But with one of the other commands I tried, it was the reverse, help <command
> worked for it, but <command> --help did nothing (at least it didn't
> trigger a reboot as help cat did).

Such issues could be caused by bad interaction of commands with the
same name in different modules:

command.lst:
*cat: cat
*help: help
cat: minicmd
help: minicmd

Something I noticed is that in grub2-mkimage, --prefix option must
come after --memdisk, and --config causes empty $prefix, --compression
doesn't seem to do anything, and individually compressing modules
works only for some of them. In short, GRUB is a mess (like usual).
You might find the following script interesting — it is similar to
grub2-mkstandalone, but selective wrt. modules (I still didn't manage
to boot Linux in QEMU with EFI firmware, however):
https://github.com/mkdesu/liberte/blob/master/src/root/helpers/gen-efi

-- 
Maxim Kammerer
Liberté Linux (discussion / support: http://dee.su/liberte-contribute)