Grub2 on Karmic does not detect NetBSD 5

[Peter Hardman]

Binary package hint: grub2

Ubuntu 9.10
Grub2 1.97 beta 4

When update-grub is run NetBSD 5.0.1 installations anywhere, whether on the drive where Karmic is running or another drive are not detected although Windows XP, Debian and other Ubuntu installations are detected.

Detection fails on two machines.

NetBSD can be booted via both chainload and multiboot commands installed manually with a 21_netbsd script.

I can investigate this if requested but will need a pointer into the source to get started.

[Peter Hardman (peter-somborneshetlands)]

I've been poking about...

This is not a bug in GRUB2. In fact it's not really a bug at all, just an un-implemented feature in os-prober.

os-prober has no script to detect BSD filesystems. Even if it did all BSD filesystems are mounted without specifying the ufstype because blkid returns a very unhelpful TYPE parameter. Then either mount chooses the wrong ufstype or it just uses the default of oldufs. In either case the NetBSD partition is unreadable. If the correct ufstype (44bsd) is given to the mount command the partition is readable.

So if it's thought worthwhile I will see if I can come up with a change to 50mounted-tests to do a better job of choosing the correct ufstype for ufs ilesystems, and write a script to output the correct parameters for GRUB2 for these filesystems.

Pete

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Thanks for your report. I'll mark this as a duplicate of bug 432254 which is basically the same thing, but I'd very much appreciate a patch to correct this since I don't use BSD systems.

Regarding the mount type problem in particular, it would be best to fix blkid if at all possible rather than working around it in os-prober.