Re: question about 2.4.18 and ext3

[Mike Fedyk <mfedyk@matchmail.com>]

On Tue, Mar 19, 2002 at 08:57:51AM +0100, H?kon Alstadheim wrote:
> Andrew Morton <akpm@zip.com.au> writes:
> 
> > Colin Leroy wrote:
> > > 
> > > Hello all,
> > > 
> > > I really hope I'm not asking a FAQ, i looked in the archives since 15 Feb
> > > and didn't see anything about this.
> > > 
> > > I upgraded from 2.2.20 to 2.4.18 on my powerbook two weeks ago, and
> > > compiled ext3 in the kernel in order to quietly crash :)
> > > 
> > > However, I had about a dozen strange crashes, sometimes when the computer
> > > woke up from sleep, sometimes when launching a program : every visible
> > > soft died, then X, then blackscreen, and the computer didn't even answer
> > > pings. So I reset the computer and here, each time, yaboot (ppc equivalent
> > > of lilo) told me that "cannot load image". Booting and fscking from a
> > > rescue CD showed that superblock was corrupt.
> > 
> > It may be a yaboot/ext3 incompatibility.  Your version of yaboot
> > may not know how to mount a needs-recovery ext3 filesystem.
> > There are some words on this at
> > http://www.zip.com.au/~akpm/linux/ext3/ext3-usage.html
> > 
> > I am told that yaboot 1.3.5 and later will do the right thing.
> > What version are you using?
> 
> One way to work around this is to keep your kernels in /boot and have
> /boot be a separate ext2 filesystem that you normally mount ro. That
> way it will not need to be recovered after a crash. During install of
> a new kernel you will of course need to do "/bin/mount -o remount,rw
> /boot" and then afterwards "/bin/mount -o remount,ro /boot" .
> 
> Your /etc/fstab will then look something like:
> 
> [...]
> /dev/hde3 /      ext3 # your usual parameters here
> /dev/hda6 /boot  ext2 ro,exec   1   2
> [...]
> 
> Remember to make sure you know which devices are / and /boot/
> respectively, and also which device holds the bootsector. Make sure
> you know which one to give to your bootloader where.
> 
> I run grub-install like this:
> /usr/local/sbin/grub-install /dev/hda --root-directory=/boot

Grub won't work on ppc IIRC, but it does work similarly by reading the
filesystem.