Bug 2033158

Summary:	Grub documentation out of date in System Administration Guide
Product:	[Retired] Fedora Documentation	Reporter:	Chris Irwin <fedora>
Component:	system-administrator's-guide	Assignee:	Petr Bokoc <pbokoc>
Status:	CLOSED UPSTREAM	QA Contact:	Fedora Docs QA <docs-qa>
Severity:	unspecified	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	devel	CC:	equeim, spamulousbastard+redhat, swadeley
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Last Closed:	2024-05-21 13:02:17 UTC	Type:	Bug
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Description Chris Irwin 2021-12-16 04:36:30 UTC

Description of problem:

Grub2 documentation is out of date in System Administrators Guide.

It explains how grub was configured in previous releases, but doesn't explain the current configuration and tools sufficiently/

* systemd Boot Loader Specification (/boot/loader/entries)

* grubby description is inaccurate (it says it edits grub.cfg, while it looks like it now edits /boot/loader/entries/*conf files)

* location of grub config (/boot/grub2/grub.cfg, even on EFI systems now)

* menuentries in grub.cfg (not used now)

* Gives instruction to `grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg` several times, but that is not the proper location now

* Above command is given for "Editing a Menu Entry" to change kernel command args, but it doesn't do that any more. grubby must be used for that task.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

Fedora 35 Documentation: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/f35/system-administrators-guide/kernel-module-driver-configuration/Working_with_the_GRUB_2_Boot_Loader/

Rawhide documentation appears the same.

How reproducible:

It's documentation, so every time.

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Look at Fedora documentation to see where kernel menuentries are defined
2. Documentation says /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg
3. That is not correct.

Actual results:

1. /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg is only a stub to load /boot/grub2/grub.cfg, even on EFI systems (documentation says this file is BIOS only)
2. No kernel menu entries are defined there, either
3. Kernel menu entries defined in /boot/loader/entries/*conf files, and probed by grub via unknown mechanism

Expected results:

Expected documentation to match and explain grub configuration on a current Fedora system.

Additional info:

Comment 1 Chris Irwin 2021-12-16 04:41:42 UTC

It appears this change occurred in Fedora 30:

  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/BootLoaderSpecByDefault

That link also mentions the main problem with the change was out of date documentation, although it didn't specifically identify the Fedora System Administrator's Guide.

Comment 2 Alexey Rochev 2022-06-27 18:00:35 UTC

This issue is still present. I recently (accidentally) wiped my UEFI partition and instructions in Fedora documentation didn't help me to restore bootloader. Fortunately, I remembered about related change in F34 (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/UnifyGrubConfig) and realised that they are incorrect. Unfortunately, it appears that /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg file that loads main /boot/grub2/grub.cfg is generated only when installing Fedora and there is no way to restore it so I had to download Anaconda source code to figure out what it should actually contain.

Comment 3 Petr Bokoc 2024-05-21 13:02:17 UTC

Migrated to https://gitlab.com/fedora/docs/fedora-linux-documentation/fedora-linux-sysadmin-guide/-/issues/17.