Re: Guidance on conflicts between GNU GRUB and proprietary software

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 09:43:25PM +0200, Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko 
wrote:
> GPT has new types.

GPT has an msdos partition type for itself for use in hybrid setups.
I know GPT partition tables have new types, but GPT itself has a type
reserved in the old dos partition table.

> in msdos there are only 255 possible types. Some are known to be used by
> well known software but during 10 years of no central body for this and
> everybody willing a type just taking one in self-service I think every
> single type is used by either widely known or mostly unknown software.
> And destroying someone's hobby OS would be a bad thing.

And not having a reliable grub on actual used OSs isn't a bad thing?
Someone's hobby OS could change if it was an issue.

> GRUB has a design principle of being cross-platform installable.
> Moreover the same disk can contain multiple grub installation. I
> personally regularly move the disk between yeeloong and amd64 laptop,
> well it has only one GRUB since on yeeloong my GRUB is in flash but it
> could easily have one on disk too.

If two architectures expect sector 0 to contain boot code, then that
can't work.  I certainly would not consider that a worthy design goal
compared to lots of other things.

-- 
Len Sorensen