[Bug 1059827] Re: Non trival grub2 installs no longer fit in small embed areas

[Colin Watson]

Escalation won't particularly help as this is just plain difficult to
fix: there's no single cause for the code growing beyond the relevant
size, but rather gradual accretion of bug-fixes has meant the code is
now just slightly larger than will fit.  I don't regard LVM or RAID as
exotic, and in that case this is a regression; they're close enough to
the size limit that we may be able to squeeze things back down again in
a future upstream version, but it will take some slow and steady work.

btrfs and ZFS are over the size limit by a very considerable margin, and
it is unlikely that we will ever be able to squeeze support for those
into 62 sectors.  They were never there in the first place, so in that
case this isn't a regression.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1059827

Title:
  Non trival grub2 installs no longer fit in small embed areas

Status in “grub2” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  Traditionally the first boot track of the disk was left unpartitioned.
  This area is used to embed the grub2 core.img file.  The size of this
  area used to typically be 62 sectors.  In recent years the typical
  size has changed to 2048 sectors to keep the partitions aligned to a 1
  MiB boundary for performance reasons on SSDs and newer hard disks with
  4KiB sector sizes.  All but the most trivial configurations of grub no
  longer fit in the old 62 sector size embed area.  This results in grub
  complaining that your embed area is unusually small.

  Upstream appears to have no desire to support such configurations, so
  this is unlikely to be fixed, but I will leave this bug report open
  for now.  The workaround for the problem is to repartition the disk
  with modern partitioning tools that will align partitions to 1MiB,
  thus leaving 2048 sectors for the embed area.

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