On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 04:36:34PM +0100, Jamie Lokier wrote:

quoted

Shrug, either we force the user to do something to get the blocks on
disk in a stable location or we have a bootloader that can parse the
disk format.  It's either pain on the developers (patching grub) or pain
on every user, and the support people who have to remind them to rerun
grub-find-the-disk-blocks-just-like-lilo

I think this thread may be confusing /usr/bin/grub with grub the bootloader.

One of the useful features of grub the bootloader is that it can boot
from a real filesystem without needing "run lilo before it's safe to
boot - or you'll regret shutting down".

That feature needs to use some kind of bleeding-eyes filesystem code,
or it will be as large as the filesystem code in Linux.

If the lilo or grub approach is better is at least debatable, but that's
not really the point here.

On the other hand, any dodgy direct access done by /usr/bin/grub has
no justification and is fair game for deletion, imho.

That _is_ the real problem.  But we're getting quite offtopic as non
of that is related to FIEMAP anymore ;-)