I suspect the continuing presence of device.map in TW and Leap in any case is a consequence of openSUSE continuing to include Grub Legacy in the repos, and kernel installation and removal processes continuing to support updating Grub Legacy’s menu.lst for those who continue to depend on Grub Legacy and have no need for Grub2 to fix what for them ain’t broke. We are blessed to continue to have the choice, even though it takes extra work to keep the old way working with a fresh installation instead of zypper online upgrade. In any event, presence of device.map should not be producing error messages or outright bootloader failures. Surely such are results of Perl/YaST2/Installer rewrites that need fixing.