Re: [PATCH] Remove root drive support

[Robert Millan]

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 01:41:18AM +0200, Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 10:45 PM, Pavel Roskin<address@hidden> wrote:
> > Root drive support is not actually used by the installer.  Root drive is
> > superseded by grub_prefix with UUID, which is much more flexible, is
> > already used by grub-setup for cross-drive installs and doesn't require
> > a single byte in the boot sector.
> I successfully tested this patch in qemu with both grub-mkrescue and
> multiboot load grub2-by-grub2. As I see root drive was always set to
> 0xFF and so this field is useless and as it's in size-critical part.
> However reading grub-install revealed that cross-drive install would
> fail if target filesystem has no UUIDs or if UUIDs are unsupported by
> grub. Currently it includes following filesystems:
> affs,afs,cpio/tar,hfs,jfs,minix,sfs, udf, ufs
> As you can see it includes even important filesystems like ufs. Now
> the question to discuss is whether we want to implement UUIDs for this
> fileystems, let it be like it is or have a cross-drive install w/o
> UUIDs. Even if we choose the last option I think root field still has
> to be removed and we can just use non-UUID drive name for prefix

Cross-drive installs are not that important;  I removed support for them
on non-UUID filesystems quite a while ago, and so far nobody has complained.

In case a user with one of these filesystems wants to go cross-drive (which
isn't really a good idea anyway), implementing UUID support wouldn't be
too hard.

-- 
Robert Millan

  The DRM opt-in fallacy: "Your data belongs to us. We will decide when (and
  how) you may access your data; but nobody's threatening your freedom: we
  still allow you to remove your data and not access it at all."