grub / ext4 compatibility problem?

grub / ext4 compatibility problem?

[Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz]

Hi,

I've run into a really peculiar problem today..

After the last /boot/grub/grub.conf update (just to test today's linux-next)
grub reads the file's content as a garbage and drops into the interactive
mode (cat /boot/grub/grub.conf from within the inteactive mode shows garbage,
other files are read fine).

This makes booting quite challenging (interactive mode is easy to manage,
remembering kernel name derived from the git tree is the difficult part ;)
but once the system is running I can read the content of the file just fine.

On the first manual boot ext4 reported some filesystem problems & fixed them:

EXT4-fs (hda1): barriers enabled
kjournald2 starting: pid 449, dev hda1:20, commit interval 5 seconds
EXT4-fs (hda1): delayed allocation enabled
EXT4-fs: file extents enabled
EXT4-fs: mballoc enabled
EXT4-fs (hda1): orphan cleanup on readonly fs
EXT4-fs (hda1): ext4_orphan_cleanup: deleting unreferenced inode 261260
EXT4-fs (hda1): 1 orphan inode deleted
EXT4-fs (hda1): recovery complete
EXT4-fs (hda1): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode

but the /etc/grub/grub.conf problem is still there (I thought that it may
be a good idea to report it first before trying to run fsck manually).

This is on Fedora 11 system (I upgraded from Fedora 10 few days ago) with
all updates and ext3 migrated (per HOWTO on ext4 wiki) to ext4 yesterday.

Is this something worth people's attention or should I just try to run fsck
manually?

Thanks,
Bart

Re: grub / ext4 compatibility problem?

[Eric Sandeen]

Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've run into a really peculiar problem today..

...

> This is on Fedora 11 system (I upgraded from Fedora 10 few days ago) with
> all updates and ext3 migrated (per HOWTO on ext4 wiki) to ext4 yesterday.
> 
> Is this something worth people's attention or should I just try to run fsck
> manually?


is /boot ext4?  F11's grub doesn't yet understand ext4, as mentioned in
the releasenotes.  I hope to remedy that soon but in the F11 devel
cycle, other bugs of the oopsing & corrupting kind were more pressing...

-Eric

Re: grub / ext4 compatibility problem?

[Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz]

On Wednesday 17 June 2009 16:46:57 Eric Sandeen wrote:
> Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I've run into a really peculiar problem today..
> 
> ...
> 
> > This is on Fedora 11 system (I upgraded from Fedora 10 few days ago) with
> > all updates and ext3 migrated (per HOWTO on ext4 wiki) to ext4 yesterday.
> > 
> > Is this something worth people's attention or should I just try to run fsck
> > manually?
> 
> 
> is /boot ext4?  F11's grub doesn't yet understand ext4, as mentioned in
> the releasenotes.  I hope to remedy that soon but in the F11 devel
> cycle, other bugs of the oopsing & corrupting kind were more pressing...

I see it now, in my case there is no separate /boot partition.. :)

Thanks Eric & sorry for the noise.

Bart

Re: grub / ext4 compatibility problem?

[Eric Sandeen]

Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz wrote:
> On Wednesday 17 June 2009 16:46:57 Eric Sandeen wrote:
>> Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I've run into a really peculiar problem today..
>> ...
>>
>>> This is on Fedora 11 system (I upgraded from Fedora 10 few days ago) with
>>> all updates and ext3 migrated (per HOWTO on ext4 wiki) to ext4 yesterday.
>>>
>>> Is this something worth people's attention or should I just try to run fsck
>>> manually?
>>
>> is /boot ext4?  F11's grub doesn't yet understand ext4, as mentioned in
>> the releasenotes.  I hope to remedy that soon but in the F11 devel
>> cycle, other bugs of the oopsing & corrupting kind were more pressing...
> 
> I see it now, in my case there is no separate /boot partition.. :)
> 
> Thanks Eric & sorry for the noise.

No problem, sorry I didn't get grub going before F11 released :)

-Eric

Re: grub / ext4 compatibility problem?

[Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz]

On Wednesday 17 June 2009 17:20:26 Eric Sandeen wrote:
> Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz wrote:
> > On Wednesday 17 June 2009 16:46:57 Eric Sandeen wrote:
> >> Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz wrote:
> >>> Hi,
> >>>
> >>> I've run into a really peculiar problem today..
> >> ...
> >>
> >>> This is on Fedora 11 system (I upgraded from Fedora 10 few days ago) with
> >>> all updates and ext3 migrated (per HOWTO on ext4 wiki) to ext4 yesterday.
> >>>
> >>> Is this something worth people's attention or should I just try to run fsck
> >>> manually?
> >>
> >> is /boot ext4?  F11's grub doesn't yet understand ext4, as mentioned in
> >> the releasenotes.  I hope to remedy that soon but in the F11 devel
> >> cycle, other bugs of the oopsing & corrupting kind were more pressing...
> > 
> > I see it now, in my case there is no separate /boot partition.. :)
> > 
> > Thanks Eric & sorry for the noise.
> 
> No problem, sorry I didn't get grub going before F11 released :)

Hm, upon looking at the ext4 patch for the grub I think that including it
can't make the situation worse.  It is quite compact/clean patch and grub
cannot ever access such fs in write mode (AFAICS from the quick look)?

Though I can imagine that comments like this one:

+      /* map extents enabled logical block number to physical fs on-dick block number */

may significantly decrease confidence in the changes. :)

Thanks.
Bart

Re: grub / ext4 compatibility problem?

[Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz]

On Wednesday 17 June 2009 17:40:01 Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz wrote:
> On Wednesday 17 June 2009 17:20:26 Eric Sandeen wrote:
> > Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz wrote:
> > > On Wednesday 17 June 2009 16:46:57 Eric Sandeen wrote:
> > >> Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz wrote:
> > >>> Hi,
> > >>>
> > >>> I've run into a really peculiar problem today..
> > >> ...
> > >>
> > >>> This is on Fedora 11 system (I upgraded from Fedora 10 few days ago) with
> > >>> all updates and ext3 migrated (per HOWTO on ext4 wiki) to ext4 yesterday.
> > >>>
> > >>> Is this something worth people's attention or should I just try to run fsck
> > >>> manually?
> > >>
> > >> is /boot ext4?  F11's grub doesn't yet understand ext4, as mentioned in
> > >> the releasenotes.  I hope to remedy that soon but in the F11 devel
> > >> cycle, other bugs of the oopsing & corrupting kind were more pressing...
> > > 
> > > I see it now, in my case there is no separate /boot partition.. :)
> > > 
> > > Thanks Eric & sorry for the noise.
> > 
> > No problem, sorry I didn't get grub going before F11 released :)
> 
> Hm, upon looking at the ext4 patch for the grub I think that including it
> can't make the situation worse.  It is quite compact/clean patch and grub
> cannot ever access such fs in write mode (AFAICS from the quick look)?

I got a confirmation from Peng Tao (the patch author) that this is indeed
a case here.

The patch works fine for me so just in case if somebody runs into the same
issue I'm posting the current F11/x86 grub package with ext4 support here:

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/bart/f11/

grub-0.97-50.fc11.ext4.i586.rpm
grub-0.97-50.fc11.ext4.src.rpm

[ Please note that doing grub-install is needed after installing it. ]

Thanks.
Bart