On 2/5/12 6:11 PM, Dave Chinner wrote: > On Fri, Feb 03, 2012 at 12:50:17PM -0600, Eric Sandeen wrote: >> On 2/3/12 8:39 AM, Marcos Mello wrote: >>> Eric Sandeen <sandeen <at> sandeen.net> writes: >>> >>>> >>>> In general there is no problem with xfs on a root partition. However, the >>> installer >>>> may not make it easy or available for you. >>>> >>>> (I never use xfs for /boot though, I don't trust grub enough for that >>> honestly). >>>> >>>> -Eric >>> >>> Same thing on Fedora 16. Let's hope some day Anaconda will change that. >> >> F16 prevents it? I didn't see it in the upstream tree. That should >> not be so. :/ >> >>> About GRUB with a XFS /boot the problem was with GRUB Lagacy, wasn't it? >>> Or GRUB2 is still buggy? >> >> I have no idea, actually. I delved into grub a bit, it was disturbing >> enough that I have not tried to look at grub2. :) > > Certainly the problem exists with legacy grub - it assumes that it > can write to the first sector or any disk or partition which > overwrites the XFS superblock... well, it was worse than that. I can work around the grub-on-a-partition problem, but what I ran into was grub reading & writing to/from the block device under a mounted filesystem - corruption and hilarity ensued. -Eric > The grub2 manual: > > http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html#BIOS-installation > > indicates that if you are using BIOS/MBR based booting, then grub2 > still writes to the first sector of the partition that contains the > grub directory to install the stage 1.5 loader. Indeed: > > "boot.img > > On PC BIOS systems, this image is the first part of GRUB to start. > It is written to a master boot record (MBR) or to the boot sector of > a partition. Because a PC boot sector is 512 bytes, the size of this > image is exactly 512 bytes. > > The sole function of boot.img is to read the first sector of the > core image from a local disk and jump to it. Because of the size > restriction, boot.img cannot understand any file system structure, > so grub-setup hardcodes the location of the first sector of the core > image into boot.img when installing GRUB. " > > IOWs, you have to treat grub2 identically to legacy grub in that it > thinks it owns the first sector of any partition on the disk. > Therefore, you need a separate /boot partition that is not formated > with XFS to be safe. > > There's a reason I went back to using LILO.... > > Cheers, > > Dave. _______________________________________________ xfs mailing list xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx http://oss.sgi.com/mailman/listinfo/xfs
