[arch-dev-public] current e2fsprogs incompatible with grub

[Xavier]

Roman Kyrylych wrote:
> 2008/2/9, Jan de Groot<jan at jgc.homeip.net>:
>> Creating a boot filesystem with the default settings for mke2fs will
>> render grub useless because grub can't read partitions created with it.
>>
>> The issue is that the inode size is 256 by default, which is compatible
>> with kernel 2.6.10 and higher. Older kernels, and also grub won't work
>> with anything else than 128, which is the default according to the
>> manpage (but clearly isn't).
>>
>> We should fix this before making our new installer CD and we should nag
>> upstream about this. During my search for a solution, I found not a
>> single solution, but several forum posts coming from several
>> distributions, all without solution other than "install lilo, grub is
>> broken on my distro".
>>
>
> That sucks. :-(
> Where the hell those developers look before doing such stupid
> incompatible changes? :-/
>

That's funny, my first feeling when I read about that issue was :
Why the hell did those developers put such stupid limitation? :)
(or: did not remove)

Well, my first result on google looks interesting :
http://people.debian.org/~terpstra/message/20080130.140155.866d3ad1.en.html

There is a patch attached, and the following information :
>
> Even though I understand that grub(-legacy) is in feature freeze (grub2
> does already support booting from ext3 partitions with 256 byte inodes), I
> personally would prefer an update to grub 0.97, given that this issue
> leaves the (newly installed/ moved) system unbootable without any chance
> for manual interaction (grub neither installs and dies without any message)
> and that the patch seems to be of reasonable size, while grub2 doesn't seem
> to be ready for mass deployment.