From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from cuda.sgi.com (cuda3.sgi.com [192.48.176.15]) by oss.sgi.com (8.14.3/8.14.3/SuSE Linux 0.8) with ESMTP id q161soVM092771 for ; Sun, 5 Feb 2012 19:54:51 -0600 Received: from ipmail04.adl6.internode.on.net (ipmail04.adl6.internode.on.net [150.101.137.141]) by cuda.sgi.com with ESMTP id A7jEUbQTHNN1OZf5 for ; Sun, 05 Feb 2012 17:54:48 -0800 (PST) Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2012 12:54:30 +1100 From: Dave Chinner Subject: Re: Placing the root partition on an XFS filesystem is not supported Message-ID: <20120206015430.GK6922@dastard> References: <4F2B02C4.8070903@sandeen.net> <4F2C2C69.5020103@sandeen.net> <20120206001123.GJ6922@dastard> <4F2F1B28.3060308@sandeen.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <4F2F1B28.3060308@sandeen.net> List-Id: XFS Filesystem from SGI List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: xfs-bounces@oss.sgi.com Errors-To: xfs-bounces@oss.sgi.com To: Eric Sandeen Cc: linux-xfs@oss.sgi.com, Marcos Mello On Sun, Feb 05, 2012 at 06:13:28PM -0600, Eric Sandeen wrote: > 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.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. Oh, grub2 does worse things than that - grub_probe mounts any device that appears to have a valid superblock so it can find out what devices it needs to list in it's boot menu. I found this out when I built a big DM stripe out of disks that used to have filesystems on them. grub-probe mounted every single device -inside- the stripe and ran log recovery on them, corrupting the new filesystem and quite a bit of data on the DM stripe they were part of.... Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Chinner david@fromorbit.com _______________________________________________ xfs mailing list xfs@oss.sgi.com http://oss.sgi.com/mailman/listinfo/xfs