https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=841247
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=841247#c15
--- Comment #15 from Michael Chang
It will not be *always* fail but the fallback (blocklist) installation will.
I've tried it dozens of times, maybe close to a hundred, in various configurations and it always fails to install to a partition formatted either Btrfs or XFS.
We don't modify upstream grub-install so probably some fedora patches make the difference ?
The --force provides nothing useful for Btrfs. (But some other file systems like extX could fallback to blockslist via --force if installing on a vbr)
Seems like it's only used for ext, which GRUB upstream actively recommends not doing because they consider it fragile. ext devs think this is overly cautious. And syslinux devs think its the only correct way to boot a system (i.e. use of the MBR gap is a hideous practice).
We know it's not recommended by upstream. The reason is historical because we need to support existing setups installed by our installer. And we has been proposing partition in favor of MBR since legacy grub era (or even lilo) in sake of better multi-boot compatibility with other distributions via chainloading (there's no os-prober in that age, and os-probe has it's own problems). The --force is therefore required in order to install to a partition (using blocklists if the file system did not have bootloader pad).
Also, GRUB upstream prefers the use of a 1MB MBR gap or BIOS Boot over the 64KB Btrfs bootloader pad.
IF your operating system too old (like Windoze XP) the partition tool with partition in cylinder bounties and the size is determined by sectors per track. In most case it's 63 sectors and you have only 32kB to use, far less than 1MB. (it looks typically like comment#4). Plus the logical partition makes the situation even worse .. (the logical partition and bootloader pad in it can't be chainloaded by mbr directly ..). -- 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.