Ubuntu
grub-installer package

grub xfs_freeze horribly broken

Bug #31719 reported by John Moser on 2006-02-17

This bug report is a duplicate of: Bug #8058: grub-install hangs with xfs root/boot. Edit Remove

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	grub-installer (Ubuntu)	Confirmed	Low	Unassigned

Bug Description

when installing to an XFS on /boot with /boot on /, xfs_freeze is used to "fix" a grub-install bug. The result is that / is frozen and then commands are run from /; this is a deadlock. Even xfs_freeze -u cannot be run.

I escaped this by copying xfs_freeze to the live system's memory and then unfreezing the /target mount.

grub-install fails; subsiquently using 'chroot /target grub' and the below commands successfully installs grub:

grub> root (hd0,6)
grub> setup (hd0)

I believe that there is just breakage in grub-install and someone needs to rewrite it; grub obviously works, grub-install dislikes XFS. Odd for a bash script.

Revision history for this message

Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote on 2006-02-17:

No, it's not grub-install, it's a race condition in XFS. By the time you get round to running grub manually, XFS has settled down and managed to actually write everything to disk; if you had time to run grub manually as the installer's running grub-install, you'd see the same effect.

The question is, how long do we wait to let XFS settle? 15 seconds? 30 seconds? A minute? An hour? Who knows?

Revision history for this message

John Moser (nigelenki) wrote on 2006-02-17:

Oh is THAT all.

This has been around HOW long? I saw it in warty. Has anyone alerted the LKML? Did they decide they didn't care? This really, really needs to be fixed in the XFS driver itself.

Revision history for this message

Matt Zimmerman (mdz) wrote on 2006-04-04:

XFS is very much a non-default advanced option -> minor

Colin Watson (cjwatson) on 2006-04-04

Changed in base-installer:
status:	Unconfirmed → Confirmed

Revision history for this message

Mikko Rantalainen (mira) wrote on 2006-06-29:

Perhaps XFS and xfs_freeze should be fixed then to not return until the writing is complete (or the system has "settled down")? Perhaps these patches would help:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=306966
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=239111

At the very least, the installer should tell me that grub could fail to install on XFS partition. AFAIK the debian installer warns about the issue but the ubuntu desktop install doesn't.