memtest86+ and grub.conf

[Paulo Cavalcanti]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 1:18 PM, Paulo Cavalcanti <promac at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 10:26 AM, Warren Togami <wtogami at redhat.com>wrote:
>
>> Hans de Goede wrote:
>>
>>> Please discuss making any changes to grub.conf with Peter Jones
>>> (pjones at redhat.com) he knows grubby best. I'm not sure what to
>>> think about adding an option to grub.conf in general, it does
>>> make sorta sense when people install memtest86 to do that, but
>>> otoh it feels a bit wrong. I think this is best discussed on
>>> Fedora-devel, and then if there is consensus that adding a
>>> grub.conf entry is a good idea Peter Jones is the one yo ask
>>> technical questions about grubby.
>>>
>>
>> Some background:
>>
>> I initially implemented memtest86+ to automatically add itself to
>> grub.conf in %post.  Jeremy disliked this because it wont work during
>> anaconda where grub.conf did not exist at that point yet.  He suggested just
>> providing a script to add it to grub.conf manually, because doing so
>> automatically would be inconsistent.
>>
>> As for your proposed build change to memtest86+, I have never seen grub
>> fail to boot memtest86+ in the way that you described, and also upstream
>> doesn't build it in that way.  Please discuss with upstream your proposed
>> build changes.
>>
>
> There are plenty of references to "Error 28: Selected item cannot fit into
> memory"
> on google:
>
> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=706261
>
>
> http://www.smop.co.uk/blog/index.php/2009/01/04/grub-error-28-selected-item-cannot-fit-into-memory/
>
> http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?3404
>
> In fact, I think memtest86 is supposed to be run using a floppy, a CD-Rom
> or a Pen-drive. Adding an entry in grub.conf for booting from the HD
> is something Linux distributions have done so users may only reboot
> and choose memtest86 from the boot menu.
> Therefore, this is an issue we have to deal with by
> ourselves, because grub is not an upstream's problem.
>
> Unless I am missing something here ....
>
>

I have a working version, which follows, basically, what has
been proposed here:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=319837

I have been using it for a long time, and it works just fine.
But it requires a grub entry like this:

title Memtest86+ (2.11)
        kernel --type=netbsd /memtest86+-2.11

I altered the script /usr/sbin/memtest-setup
to accomplish that, but I would like to have some comments
about this issue. The script is supposed to work for lilo also,
but my hack is for grub only.

.....

if [ "$RETVAL" != "0" ]; then
    echo "ERROR: grubby failed to configure your bootloader for $MTPATH."
    exit $RETVAL
else
    sed -i -e's,kernel /memtest86+,kernel --type=netbsd /memtest86+,'
/boot/grub/grub.conf
    sed -i -e"s,/memtest86+-$MTVERSION.*,/memtest86+-$MTVERSION,"
/boot/grub/grub.conf
fi

echo "Setup complete."


-- 
Paulo Roma Cavalcanti
LCG - UFRJ
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/attachments/20090312/d0491345/attachment.htm>