On 2 July 2011 02:41, Linda Walsh <suse@tlinx.org> wrote:
Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
XFS works well, I've never noticed it not supported.
SIMPLE RULE: Create a 256MB ext3 /boot partition. I do this on every box running any distro - and as I said - I've never had a boot issue. Then put everything else in LVM on whatever filesystem you like.
Um...
your idea of 'advanced' and mine aren't the same. My advanced includes specifying the mount params on my xfs partitions -- INCLUDING the root partition.
If I used your setup, I'm pretty sure my system would not boot, since I'm pretty sure, IF I built in ext3 support in my kernel, at best, it would be a module, located on the XFS boot partition.
The modules in the initrd which is loaded into memory via BIOS calls like the kernel, are copies of ones required to mount '/', so the full /lib/modules & /lib are available, as well as commands in /bin & config in /etc. So long as the initrd's are built right, then '/' can be mounted via modules, supporting software RAID, LVM as well as "exotic" filesystems. There was a post on this list few years ago, explaining the problems for the YaST Perl Bootloader, GRUB and XFS, which meant it was unsupported due to it's YMMV nature in the general. lilo may have worked as it uses block lists, rather than read the filesystem format, but that fails on system like BTRFS with auto-defragmentation planned. I've also seen bugs to do with Suspend to Disk and journaled filesystems, because the journal may need replaying & GRUB doesn't have the capability; the obvious solution to put the filesytem in clean state before suspending, is problematic as they don't have way to freeze new disk transactions on a running system. GRUB can however use (for reliability possibly only as fallback) copies of the distro "/boot" files, from a partition that's usually not mounted. It just means self updating of Menu file and adding new kernel files to the /real/GRUB/boot partition. Then there's little need for "advanced" file sytems with journalling, and you get around the restrictions on new filesystems like BTRFS. Rob -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org