https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=437790 Summary: GRUB freezes when installing on XFS root partition Product: openSUSE 11.1 Version: Factory Platform: i686 OS/Version: Other Status: NEW Severity: Blocker Priority: P5 - None Component: Installation AssignedTo: bnc-team-screening@forge.provo.novell.com ReportedBy: matt@genesi-usa.com QAContact: jsrain@novell.com Found By: --- When installing Factory as a quick test to getting my VIA EPIA-M running I stumbled across this bug which I had hoped had been fixed by now (or at least skirted around). When the root filesystem or /boot filesystem are XFS, grub-install hangs during installation. It's been known about for a long time, because XFS does not always guarantee that data is written out to disk in a timely fashion, and GRUB wants to write data and then find the raw data on the disk straight afterwards. It's marked on Ubuntu Launchpad (and tracks a bunch of other downstreams) https://bugs.launchpad.net/debian/+source/grub/+bug/8058 and has a lot of discussion and a patch to the Debian Installer system by David Everly. It seems using xfs_freeze -f, a small configurable delay, and then xfs_freeze -u will synchronize the filesystem allowing grub-install to do it's work more reliably. It is not a 100% fix (still hangs sometimes, in my experience) but it works more often than it does not. In lieu of it being fixed forever, at least Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian all show warnings (similar to the ones for JFS in SuSE) about GRUB hanging when installed. SuSE does not have this warning. Is it possible to implement both the fix and the warning (so that if the fix does not work, the warning at least covers for it, and can stay around even if the fix is removed) for testing in Factory or for beta 4? BTW I just had another idea, what would the impact be of installing to XFS (or any?) partiitons which are mounted with -o sync to ensure they are written to synchronously and not passed through several chains of buffering? I think the overhead of decompression of packages would outweight the tiny performance loss from not having asynchronous writes.. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.