* Anaconda broke ISO compatibility, most likely with the following commit:
84529204fe
* However, Ret Hat, and its followers, have drunk the "DD only" kool aid, and
appear to be blissfully unaware of the very real drawbacks that enforcing a
"DD only" mode for ISOHybrid can actually place on distro users.
* Rather than spend another wasted effort trying get people, who appear to be
impervious to even remotely consider the idea that DD imaging can have flaws,
to look into the possibility that Red Hat might indeed have introduced a
regression, and given the downright hostility I have been subjected to from
trying to state this *very verifiable* fact, we'll just force DD mode for the
affected Red Hat and derivatives, whilst trusting that users will be smart
enough to compare their more limited installation experience against the ones
from other distros (such as Arch, Debian or Ubuntu, which, unlike Red Hat and
co., appear to fully understand that the whole ISOHybrid vs DD mode situation
is not all black and white), and see for themselves which distros do actually
place *their* interests first, rather than just the interests of the distro
maintainers...
* GRUB 2.0 maintainer think they're doing a fine job, even when there are
CRITICAL SECURITY FIXES that should warrant an immediate out of bound
release, and instead consider that waiting MONTHS or YEARS to release
anything is not a big deal at all.
* Ergo, distros, such as Ubuntu, start to pick whatever security patches
they see fit, since they can simply not RELY on the upstream project to
produce security releases in a timely manner. One such patch is:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2021-03/msg00012.html
* But since there is no new GRUB release per se, they still call their GRUB
version, onto which they applied patches that have come into existence
more than 2 years after the actual 2.04 release, "GRUB 2.04".
* Obviously, since GRUB 2.04 + literally hundreds of cherry picked patches
does deviate a lot from the last release, THINGS BREAK IN SPECTACULAR
FASHION, such as the recently released Ubuntu 21.04 failing to boot with
the error: grub_register_command_lockdown not found.
* Oh, and of course, regardless of all the above, if you ask anyone, they'll
tell you that there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the GRUB release
process (even if they should long have released 2.05, 2.05-1 and 2.05-2,
were their maintainer ready to acknowledge that delaying releases DOES
CREATES MAJOR ISSUES DOWSTREAM, as many people REPEATEDLY pointed to them
on the GRUB mailing list) or with the Ubuntu GRUB versioning process (that
really shouldn't be calling their version of GRUB "grub-2.04" but instead
something like "grub-2.04_ubuntu"). Oh no siree! Instead, the problem must
all be with Rufus and its maintainer, who should either spend their lives
pre-emptively figuring which breaking patch every other distro applied out
there, or limit media creation to DD mode, like any "sensible" person
would do, since DD mode is the ultimate panacea (Narrator: "It wasn't").
* So, once again, a massive thanks to all the people who have been involved
in the current GRUB 2.0 shit show, whose DIRECT result is to make end
users' lives miserable, while GRUB maintainers are hell bent on continuing
to pretend that everything's just peachy and are busy patting themselves
on the back on account that "Fedora recently dropped more than 100 of the
custom patches they had to apply to their GRUB fork" (sic). Nothing to see
here, it's just GRUB maintainer's Jedi business as usual. Besides, who the
hell cares about Windows users trying to transition to Linux in a friendly
manner anyway. I mean, as long as something doesn't affect existing Linux
users, it isn't a REAL problem, right?...
* Combined with the increase in buffer size from previous commits, this
should help us get close to a device's maximum write speed.
* Also add async write support to winio.h
* Also increase the buffer size for bad blocks check operations
* This is in preparation for async reads
* Also move open/close image operations to WriteDrive()
* Also increase DD buffer size to 32 MB to improve performance
* 2e1833e91e introduced issues with VDS since, despite what
Microsoft's documentation says, balancing CoInitialize with CoUninitialize
leads to VDS not properly relinquishing disk access.
* Of course, since Grub4DOS's grldr.mbr hasn't changed from previous releases
there's not much to update there, but then again, people like version bumps.
* InternetGetConnectedState() is next to useless and doesn't provide
coherent outcome on the ARM64 platform I'm testing with. This results
in Rufus declaring that Internet is unavailable on platforms that do
have actual Internet connectivity.
* Swicth to using INetworkListManager::GetConnectivity(), which actually
reports a dependable result.
* Closes#1691
* Also remove the mutex for uprintf(), which may produce thread lockout
and remove an unwanted double GetSignatureName() call on startup.
* Looks like executables installed from the Windows Store launch with a "/InvokerPRAID"
added parameter, which of course BREAKS apps that have a defined set of parameters
and don't except that Microsoft would gingerly add random unwanted stuff there...
* The provision of this extra parameter also appears to be tied to using one of:
- <TargetDeviceFamily Name="Windows.Universal" ...>
- <uap:SplashScreen ...>
- <Application EntryPoint="$targetentrypoint$" ...>
in the appxmanifest.
* This resulted in our argument processing loop to cause early exit on account that an
unexpected option was provided.
* Fix this by adding an explicit check for /InvokerPRAID and not exiting on unhandled
params and removing or altering the 3 appxmanifest options listed above.
* Also set an explicit Windows.FullTrustApplication and remove splash screen.
* Also update _pre-commit.sh to update appstore build number automatically.
* Also remove splash screen images, add store listing CSV and toggle App builds to manual.
* Closes#1690
Yes!!! We are finally *much* faster than 7-zip for SHA-256, even though
we are also computing MD5 and SHA-1 in parallel. Here are some averaged
comparative results, against the 5.71 GB Win10_20H2_EnglishInternational_x64.iso
(SHA-256 = 08535b6dd0a4311f562e301c3c344b4aefd2e69a82168426b9971d6f8cab35e1):
* Windows' PowerShell Get-FileHash: 48s
* 7-zip's SHA-256 : 31s
* Rufus (64-bit release version) : 23s