[coreboot] GRUB 2 isn't a great payload at all

[Paul Menzel]

Am Samstag, den 11.04.2015, 18:29 +0200 schrieb Peter Stuge:
> FWIW, I dislike GRUB for several reasons; it does far too much to be
> an improvement over a minimal payload

Which payloads do you have in mind?

> and it does far too little to be an improvement over a Linux payload.

I guess that depends on your needs and the hardware.

1. Is there enough room for the Linux payload?
2. The Linux kernel has to be updated far more often in my experience
than GRUB. Each Linux kernel upgrade requires manual work.

> It duplicates lots of work already exists in other places and it has
> probably also duplicated some of the bugs.

Could you please list those you have experienced as I cannot think of
anything yet?

> Not to mention the reliability problems I have had with GRUB a long
> time ago. A bootloader which spontaneously stops booting my system
> does not get a second chance. Sorry, that's just a waste of time.
> 
> It could be argued that GRUB2 is not GRUB, but I don't think GRUB2
> is an improvement.

A lot has changed! ;-) There is also test suite (`make check`) and I
haven’t had any problems for over three or four years. You should give
it another try.

> Paul Menzel wrote:
> > in my experience GRUB is a great payload and it makes sense to load
> > it directly and let coreboot run the VGA Option ROM/Video BIOS.
> 
> I disagree strongly that it makes sense. coreboot doesn't provide a
> BIOS environment and is thus not suitable for option ROM execution.
> When it happens to work that is clearly a corner case.

In my experience all VGA Option ROMs which worked in SeaBIOS could also
be successfully run by coreboot as coreboot was doing that for a long
time before SeaBIOS existed.

> Recommending a corner case (requiring discovery of details of each
> option ROM) for the general case just is not good advice.

Agreed.

One last question, as you wrote above, you prefer a Linux kernel
payload, how do you deal with VGA Option ROMs in that situation? Or do
you only use the Linux kernel payload if coreboot has support for native
graphics initialization for the graphics device?


Thanks,

Paul
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