Grub2 File Overview (Demo)
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Video Transcription
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>> Hello Cybrarians and welcome back to
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the Linux plus course here in Cybrary.
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I'm your instructor Rob Dells and in today's lesson,
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we'll be discussing GRUB2 files and directories.
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Upon completion of this lesson,
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you will be able to locate GRUB2 files in CentOS and
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Ubuntu and we'll discuss
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the contents of GRUB2 files and directories.
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Demo time. Let's move on over
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to our demonstration environment and take a look.
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Let's take a look at GRUB2
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using the newest CentOS Distro,
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which is CentOS 8,
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you can see that here, rob@centos8.
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Just from past experience,
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I can tell you that in order to go
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ahead and look inside of
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these files and even just list the contents
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of the boot GRUB2 directory, we need to become root.
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Now normally I would not recommend doing so.
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Certainly if you can't always
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run escalated privileges temporarily,
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but just to speed things up here,
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we're going to become root
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temporarily and we're going to go ahead and we're going
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to take a look inside of the
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boot grub.2 or GRUB2 directory,
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so let's go ahead and do that.
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I'm going to navigate to cd boot grub2 and then we're
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going to run an ls -al so
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that we can see the contents of this directory.
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Look, we see grub.cfg.
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Now, this is the replacement for
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grub.conf that we had in grub.
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In GRUB2, it's called
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grub.cfg and we can
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look at that file by just doing a less,
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so we'll do less grub.cfg.
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Inside this, well, the first thing we see
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at the top of this is a big scary message,
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do not edit this file.
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Well, we see that it's automatically
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generated by GRUB2 make config,
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that command is used to
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generate this file and it generates it
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using templates from the etc grub.d directory,
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and settings from etc default grub.
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Well, let's take a look at those files.
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Let's do less etc default grub and what's in here?
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Well, this is pretty much what
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we were used to seeing before.
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We see the timeout value
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and we see some information about
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the distributor and console output, etc.
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These are all default variables
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that are used when configuring GRUB2.
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We'll get more into this in a little bit down the road.
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Let's also take a look at that
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etc grub.d directory I was talking about,
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and inside of this directory,
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if we run an ls, we can see that it has
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scripts that we have here that are
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used to create the grub menu,
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different scripts for different purposes and
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we'll talk about that in a few minutes.
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We also see that we can create custom scripts here,
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so we see 40_custom that's used
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>> to create custom scripts.
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>> Then once we were to create
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those custom scripts and
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maybe modify it as the default grub,
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we can run that GRUB2 make
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config command to update our grub boot loader.
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Now let's go ahead and move over to Ubuntu.
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If we look at Ubuntu here,
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we need to change directory to
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boot grub instead of GRUB2,
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that's just because things are
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a little bit different when
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you're discussing different distributions.
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If you're talking about Ubuntu,
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even though it's GRUB2, you're going to
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find things and boot grub.
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If you're on CentOS, you'll find them in boot GRUB2.
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Let's go ahead and do an ls -al in this directory
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and here we can also see our grub.cfg file.
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If we open up that file,
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we can see our base Gary message again,
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do not edit this file.
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It's automatically generated by grub-make config.
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Well, but we see that it still uses the templates
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from etc grub.d and settings from etc default grub.
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Let's take a look at etc default grub
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and see what's going on here.
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Well, what's up with that? If we get
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into etc default grub,
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we see that it says if you change this file,
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run update grub afterwards,
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update boot grub, grub.cfg,
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this.cfg file we were just looking at a minute ago.
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We can still see all the default values here,
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but this is weird.
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What is this update grub?
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Well, remember in Linux,
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everything is a file,
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so we can actually find out what update grub does.
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The first thing we want to do is find out,
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well, what is update grub?
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Where is it? Where can we find it,
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and where can we interrogate it?
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If we do a which command,
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it'll tell us the location of update grub
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and that is in user sbin update grub and we could
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do less user sbin update grub
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and then what we'll see inside of this file
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here is that it's actually just running
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exec grub dash make config
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and the output is going to boot grub.cfg,
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which we know is that default file that
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says it's the boot loader in GRUB2.
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Really the big thing to remember is
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>> if you are in CentOS,
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>> you're running GRUB2 everywhere,
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GRUB2 for the commands, GRUB2 for the directory path.
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But if you're on Ubuntu you're going
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>> to be running grub.
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>> Don't ask me why,
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it just boils down to it
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depends which version of the
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>> operating system you're on,
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>> which distro you're using.
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Let's take a look though back at etc default grub.
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Let's get a little bit further into
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the weeds in terms of what is in here.
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Now, in etc default grub as previously mentioned,
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this is going to contain
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our configuration variables so we're
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going to see grub default which
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indicates the default operating system in the use.
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Again, that's a zero value index,
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so the first entry
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is the one that's used even though it's zero,
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it starts at zero so that's the first one.
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We'll also see that grub timeout style is hidden,
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which means that it's going to have a blank screen for
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the time period that is set for grub timeout.
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In this case, grub timeout is zero,
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so for zero seconds
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it'll be blank and then it'll start loading
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a splash screen and you'll see
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the abundance splash screen startup in this system.
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The grub distributor line is used when creating
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menu titles so that
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describes kind of what we saw previously,
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is going to describe different distributions,
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different operating systems that were maybe
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running on this system, on this hardware,
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and grub command line Linux
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is used to set Linux kernel parameters.
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We said the other piece of this puzzle
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though is our directory.
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Let's go and take a look at etc grub.d.
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If we look inside of here,
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this is the directory that contains the scripts we
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use to build the grub menu in GRUB2.
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I'll just tell you a little bit about these scripts.
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You can certainly take a look at them
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yourself if you wanted to navigate into
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this directory and you have
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a test machine you want to play with.
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But 00 header is
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the script that's used to load
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>> all those grubs settings,
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>> those lovely configuration settings,
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those default variables we set in etc default grub,
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10_linux identifies
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the different kernels that are out there.
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The Linux kernels that you use to
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boot from so as you update your system,
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you might have older kernels,
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you might want to roll back to those.
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Well, those are all found by that script and
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identified so that you can
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select them from the bootloader,
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30_os-prober searches for non-Linux
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operating systems and puts the result into memory.
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If for some reason you're dual-booting
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a bunch of Windows, which some people do,
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you'll be able to see Windows as
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a boot option from the GRUB2 bootloader menu.
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Then 40_custom as I said,
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this is a custom template that you can use.
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Generally, you would copy this template
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and then use that to create custom menu entries.
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Basically, we don't want to touch any
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of these except for 40_custom,
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which we can copy and modify as need be.
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But with that being said in this lesson,
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we covered where to find GRUB2 files in CentOS,
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where to find GRUB2 files in Ubuntu,
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we talked about the contents of grub and
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GRUB2 files and how
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they're a little bit different in GRUB2,
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and we also looked at the directories.
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With that being said, thank you very much
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>> for being here
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>> and I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson.
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