GRUB 1.99 Released With Support For ZFS and BtrFS

kthreadd writes "GNU GRUB has been updated to version 1.99. Among the many improvements are support for two new filesystems, BtrFS and ZFS. For Linux users this means that it's now possible to move to BtrFS entirely and not use it only for non-bootable volumes."

Re:why GRUB?

[Hatta]

I agree. From an ease of use perspective LILO was the shit. Never had a problem with LILO that couldn't be solved by booting a live CD and rerunning LILO. Grub, I've had no end of troubles with.

Unfortunately, Grub is pretty much essential if you want to do anything modern with your filesystems. Use any encryption, LVM, or RAID and you need Grub.

Boot separate from partitions

[hoggoth]

I like having the ability to wipe out and redo any partition without ruining my ability to boot into my other partitions. I typically multi-boot 3 or 4 partitions so this matters to me.

So I always use an independent boot manager like GAG or PLOP that can boot just about anything else and is drop dead simple to reconfigure. Each partition gets it's own favorite PARTITION boot manager, Grub for Linux, BCD for Windows, etc...

Re:Does this matter?

[zsitvaij]

To obtain all of the ext4 performance, tweaks, and reliability benefits, you MUST perform an ext4 format.

That's not entirely correct. With two commands, you get a full conversion from ext3 to ext4 without a reformat, leaving your data in place:
tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/DEV
e2fsck -fDC0 /dev/DEV

(On an unmounted filesystem, obviously. Source. [kernel.org] )