[arch-general] [arch-dev-public] grub with ext4 support

[Gerhard Brauer]

Am Mon, 29 Dec 2008 00:30:33 +0100
schrieb "Ronald van Haren" <pressh at gmail.com>:

> I will check into the grub2 issue in that case.

I've played around last days with grub2 (Version from extra and svn)
for putting it as the ISO bootloader and with ext4 FS.

- I could made a test ISO (archiso based, 2.6.28) with grub2. This boots
  fine in virtual machines (like virtualbox or qemu). But on real
  machines the cdrom (biosdisk module) wasn't found. I never see cd0 on
  real hardware, only the harddisks (looked with ls when ls-module is
  aktivated). I tried question on #grub in IRC, but no answer. (With
  the ata module the cdrom could be handselected with low speed, but
  this is not practicable...)

- grub2 and ext4. Grub2 boots fine on ext4 partitions (i have a
  ext4 /boot partition on VM). But i have problems to (re)install grub2
  when the partition **is** ext4. I tested:

/boot is ext3, install grub2, boot is fine.
Also re-installing grub2 works.
Convert /boot to ext4 (with extent), grub2 boots fine.
If trying to reinstall grub2 then (grub-install --debug /dev/sda) it
rewrites the core.img file in /boot/grub. And then the core.img file
could not be parsed: error cannot read core.img correctly. Maybe a
result of using ext4 extends. During grub-install much files
from /usr/lib/grub(?) get copied to /boot/grub again, and the core.img
file is there also build correctly (thats part of grub-setup). But then
i could not be read (maybe grub2 does this "reading/parsing" in a
unusual way which leads to problems on ext4...

This i get both with the version from extra and from svn. If this
problem is not only based on my mistake or on my enviroment, then we
would have a problem during install to install grub2 on a ext4 prepared
partition - and later if grub2 must be reinstalled.

From my experience with grub/grub2 and ext4 i would assume (also as
part of the installer):
If one would use ext4 for Root-Partition then /boot should be still
ext2/3. Ok, this is one FS module more if ext4 is preferred, but it's
save.

> 
> Ronald

Gerhard