Grub is incompatible with 256-byte inodes on ext3

[alexander@…]

This is a duplicate of ​http://bugs.debian.org/463123

When starting LFS-6.3 build from a very new system (that has the latest e2fsprogs that make 265-byte inodes by default with mke2fs--I think that LFS SVN does expose the issue), one will not be able to install GRUB as a boot loader. The log is:

grub> root (hd0,0)
 Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83

grub> setup (hd0)
 Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... no
 Checking if "/grub/stage1" exists... no

Error 2: Bad file or directory type.

There is a patch for GRUB to add such support: ​http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=15;filename=grub-support-256byte-inode.diff;att=1;bug=463123

This patch should be mentioned on the errata page for LFS-6.3. However, in order to avoid such bugs in the future, I would prefer for LFS-7.0 to switch to LILO that defers all filesystem operations to the kernel and thus is guaranteed to work with all future versions of {e2,anyother}fsprogs.

[Jeremy Huntwork]

Fixed in trunk with r8514. An errata entry for 6.3 was also created.

We could still (in the future) add LILO or other boot loaders to avoid such issues and/or provide other options. Ticket #2093 covers this already, even though it is targeted for the jh branch. Development could still begin there.

Closing this ticket since the main issues are covered at this point.