Comment 14 for bug 1045178

axion, this is probably going to be very hard for us to fix and is not going to be a priority, as btrfs is a complex filesystem that requires considerable amounts of code in GRUB to read. Given that btrfs is known not to be terribly space-efficient in many cases, it seems an odd decision to use btrfs on a small drive and then skimp on space for the boot loader code required to read it. I would expect that the megabyte you'd spend on modern partition alignment (which, incidentally, will perform much better on SSDs than the old-style alignment - many of them really benefit from being aligned on 1024*1024-byte boundaries, or sometimes even larger) will be dwarfed by the space you'll lose to btrfs. So why worry about the pennies when you're already not worrying about pounds?

Besides, you have an 80GB drive here - a megabyte is not going to break the bank! I use an 80GB SSD myself and it is not a problem.

I recommend one or more of the following:

 * Align the first partition to a multiple of 1024*1024 bytes. Yes, really. It will be better.
 * Use a separate ext2 /boot partition if you absolutely must have minimal space in the MBR.