Upgrading grub

[Nicholas Bishop]

Hi,

Would there be any interest in upgrading CrOS's version of grub to the most recent version (2.02)? Currently it is based on version 2.00 which is quite old, despite the small difference in version number. My understanding is that Chromebooks don't use EFI boot, in which case this should be a relatively low-risk change.

Making this a little tricky is that the CrOS git repo for grub is based on a direct copy of the files from a release tarball rather than the upstream grub repo:

- https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/third_party/grub2/

- https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/grub.git/

I did a quick test locally with the new version:

- Switched the git repo to upstream grub's 2.02 tag

- Forward-ported the two CrOS patches (trivial conflicts)

- Updated the ebuild to run autogen.sh before configuring

- Built with: cros_workon --host grub, sudo emerge grub, build_image base

The result runs OK in QEMU with EFI enabled (http://www.linux-kvm.org/downloads/lersek/ovmf-whitepaper-c770f8c.txt) and on my laptop in EFI mode.

Any hints on how to proceed with this? For the ebuild change I could make a CL, but not sure what to do about the git repo for grub.

-Nicholas

[Mike Frysinger]

as long as a Chromium OS build continues to boot for you in EFI & legacy BIOS mode, then i don't see issues with upgrading

it looks like the two patches we carry are quite small ?  we could try switching the ebuild to fetching the release tarball and then applying those two patches with `epatch`.  then drop the grub2 repo from our manifest entirely.

the other option would be to create a new branch in our grub2 git repo to track the 2.02 release and then point the ebuild to that.

-mike

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[Nicholas Bishop]

Good point about using epatch. I'll give that a try.

-Nicholas

[James Smith]

My system isn't booting my chormiumos build, Would upgrading to 2.02 fix that?

I need my image to boot on old and new computers

ranging from i3 and i5   and some old Dell Optiplex 745 (Intel Pentium D)

Also, I would like to boot the image of my gaming PC

Ryzen 5 1600

16GB ram

GTX 1060 6GB

[Aren Clegg]

the kernel defconfig might need to be tweaked to work on your devices.

[nathan.d...@intel.com]

Why was the ability of being able to cros_workon on grub2 been removed and why keep src/third_party/grub2 ?

[nathan.d...@intel.com]

(Ability to cros_workon-$BOARD start grub that is)

[Brian Norris]

Probably because there's no need to have the whole repo checked out? We don't really develop it, and it looks like we only ended up with 2 non-upstream patches.

https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromiumos/overlays/chromiumos-overlay/+/1066750

As for keeping third_party/grub2...it looks like someone might be removing that soon, as they should.

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[Mike Frysinger]

yeah, we'll clean up the manifest entries shortly

-mike