Re: Some concern about the journal support

[Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org>]

On Fri, 2008-06-13 at 17:49 -0400, Isaac Dupree wrote:

> true enough: grub's ext3 support is relatively unstable for now, so if I 
> use it I should be prepared to report problems and help debug them. 
> Partly I just get confused (although patches are frequently discussed on 
> the list) which patches have actually been applied to CVS, and whether 
> any of the *known* issues are still known to be unfixed in CVS. (That 
> is, I'm usually willing to be a tester, but it's generally not useful to 
> anyone to test things that are known to be broken)

You may have two kinds of problems.

If /boot/grub/core.img cannot be embedded in the first sectors of the
drive and /boot/grub is on ext3, GRUB is unlikely to boot.  There is a
patch that is likely to fix it, but it wasn't applied.

If /boot is on ext3 partition that wasn't cleanly unmounted, GRUB may
fail to boot.  This is less likely than it used to be, but it's still
possible.  It looks like some corner cases still need fixing.

If /boot is on ext2 (i.e. there is no journal), no problems are
expected.

There are still things that need to be tested.  You could try to create
a small disk image that would exhibit problems with accessing the
filesystem.  Or you could check that the last patch by Bean would work
if core.img is not embedded and the filesystem is heavily used (e.g.
more that the journal size of data is written to the filesystem).  Or if
you don't like ext3 filesystem testing, put /boot on some other
filesystem (I'm quite sure that reiserfs is broken, but the rest should
be OK).

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin