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Re: grub (was: Re: RAIDframe for dom0?)



On Tue, Aug 16, 2005 at 02:19:54PM -0400, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 16, 2005 at 10:46:52AM +0100, Dieter wrote:
> > Okay, I'll bite.  Why does everyone hate grub?
> 
> [..]
> 
> Enough said?

Not quite, I want my turn to vent :)

It has (in at least the most common incarnation/configuration I come
across) the utterly annoying habit of spamming all possible console
devices (vga, serial, etc) with "Press any key ..." messages, and
taking the first response from any of them as an indication that that
device should be used as the console for further interactive commands,
halting the boot.  This might seems like a clever idea at first blush,
until you want to put the console of some other serial device (switch,
router, etc) on one of the machine's serial ports...  

Of course, if you actually want to use a serial console for linux,
getting grub to respond on that console isn't enough, you also need to
change OS settings in several strange places, so this seems mostly
useless.  Oh, and I seem to recall a problem a coworker reported
trying to boot grub on serial console on some machine; it failed
because a vga splash screen had been configured and couldn't be
loaded or was invalid config file syntax or some such other rubbish.

Every time I want to install a new kernel, I need to edit a config
file to make it boot? Huh?

Perhaps all these cases are the fault of someone configuring it
poorly, but a boot loader shouldn't be so complex as to have such
problems or need such configuration.  Will it have a built-in mail
reader in the next version?

This and many other little annoyances are strong enough antigens to
prime the immune system: automatic allergic reaction on later contact.

--
Dan.

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