Anaconda, grub and XFS

[Dennis Gilmore]

On Friday 07 October 2005 09:28, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-10-06 at 17:24 +0100, James Pearson wrote:
> > There has been an on going issue with installing grub on an XFS
> > partition - anaconda will hang at the installing boot loader stage as
> > grub 'spins'.
> >
> > The attached patch for 'booty' works round this problem by remounting
> > the XFS file system that contains /boot as read-only and then as
> > read-write before running the grub install command.
> >
> > This patch replaces the current XFS freeze/thaw work round that fails to
> > work (a lot) more often than not.
>
> This feels like a hack for the fact that xfs_freeze doesn't work as it
> was designed to -- it is specifically for things which need the contents
> on disk to actually be what the kernel thinks is there.  And the
> continued need of random hacks like this make me more and more inclined
> to just disallow the use of XFS as a bootable filesystem.
>
> Jeremy
I regularly use XFS as a filesystem for /  and /home  and other areas  but 
because of this bug  i always use ext3 for /  and really for the use of boot  
and the size of the files in there  /boot is much better off being on ext3    
so i would say make it so /boot has to be ext3.  then you should only hit 
this issue  if someone decides to forgo a /boot partition 

Dennis