Ticket #2161 (closed task: fixed)

Opened 4 months ago

Last modified 3 months ago

Grub is incompatible with 256-byte inodes on ext3

Reported by: alexander@linuxfromscratch.org Assigned to: lfs-book@linuxfromscratch.org
Priority: highest Milestone: 7.0
Component: Book Version: SVN
Severity: blocker Keywords:
Cc:

Description

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.

Change History

04/03/08 10:50:32 changed by jhuntwork@linuxfromscratch.org

  • status changed from new to closed.
  • resolution set to fixed.

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.