[syslinux] LVM support

[Jeff Sadowski]

On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 2:38 PM, Ian Kirk <blob at blob.co.uk> wrote:
> H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>
>> In *your view*, what is the value proposition of Syslinux over Grub?
>
> Whilst not addressed to me ...
>
> GRUB did not work at all with my fairly new PC, however EXTLINUX did.
>
> GRUB Legacy is not in active development whilst GRUB2 is vaporware.
>
> Alongwith the softer benefits, of a development list that seems active and
> willing to help (i.e. the opposite of bug-grub)
>
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Ok I just got to thinking about this and now I am a little curious of
what is being asked and what grub is capable of.

I have been dealing with LVM partitions for some time.  Maybe there
was something added to LVM to allow you to put a boot section in it?

>From my understanding with an LVM partition you have a seperate boot
partition that has a initrd image and the initrd image knows how to
mount the LVM and then the initrd turns control over to the startup
scripts.

You could have a boot loader sitting in the MBR that can point to an
initrd that may exist in the LVM but I thought the whole idea of
syslinux is to get away from the MBR model newer machines that have
EFI don't use an MBR anyways. EFI isn't going to support LVM any time
soon. EFI supports FAT.

So does someone want syslinux/extlinux to be installed on a partition
inside the LVM and have it boot from in there? Is that even possible
wouldn't the boot section interfere with the LVM?

I'm guessing the new grub only supports LVM in the method I described
above and has to be installed in the MBR.

This also gets me curious about how syslinux and any boot loader
sitting on a partition works. I am thinking that the boot loader sits
at the head of the partition or there is a pointer at the head of the
partition that tells where to load the bootloader into memory from?
right?
so the head of the partition gets modified when you install a
bootloader. I don't know if LVM would be happy with any such
modification is why I am curious about this.