GRUB Adds Backup/Restore Safeguard, Support For Going Beyond Year 2038

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GRUB Adds Backup/Restore Safeguard, Support For Going Beyond Year 2038

The GRUB bootloader saw some fresh feature work merged this week...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GRUB-Backup-Restore

[Vorpal]

Why does grub care about timestamps on files? I would have assumed that all it need to do at boot time is to be able to read file names and data.

Sure, if the underlying data format on disk changes it need to adapt to it, but why would it need to keep track of the date internally after that?

Arguably, why should grub need to worry about time at all (not just for files, but at all).

[scottishduck]

Meanwhile it continues to look bad on EFI systems with hi res displays (aka most computers) because there's still no proper resolution support

[droste]

Why does grub care about timestamps on files? I would have assumed that all it need to do at boot time is to be able to read file names and data.

Sure, if the underlying data format on disk changes it need to adapt to it, but why would it need to keep track of the date internally after that?

Arguably, why should grub need to worry about time at all (not just for files, but at all).

You can list files on a partition and partitions in the grub console.
And there it will show dates and times like last modification time of the filesystem of the partition and stuff like that.
I don't think it's needed for the booting process itself.

[tildearrow]

Come on, I thought it was 2038-ready...

[waxhead]

Now the big question is if this will work or make GRUB even more error prone in the long run... crossing my fingers!

[Guest]

Meanwhile it continues to look bad on EFI systems with hi res displays (aka most computers) because there's still no proper resolution support

Hm, that might be the fault of the UEFI itself. I've noticed that if I boot directly to GRUB it looks bad, but if I start the UEFI's screen for choosing which OS to load, and then start GRUB through that it uses the full resolution and looks good.

Same problem with Windows as well.

that's on my desktop, on my laptop it works fine.