grub segmentation fault on RAID 1 lvm

[David G. Miller (aka DaveAtFraud)]

shawn at nccsc.k12.in.us wrote:

>On Friday, August 26, 2005 6:28 PM, Craig White wrote:
>  
>
>>>
>>>Nothing wrong with lilo - grub seems to work better.
>>    
>>
>
>This is not so true with RAID.  Grub does not support it like lilo does.
>In fact, my experience is that grub-install does not work with RAID1
>/boot partitions at all out of the box.  With lilo, it will
>automatically make the mirrors of RAID 1 both bootable and active with a
>boot image after lilo is executed.  You can literally kill either drive
>and still be able to boot into the degraded one.  In order to do this
>with grub, the boot image must be installed onto both drives manually,
>or it must be patched as Bill described.
>
>  
>
>>>
>>>I think that there are thousands of people successfully 
>>>running Fedora and a few people that are struggling can 
>>>mislead others into thinking that there are some problematic 
>>>issues with the defaults but typically, they have varied from 
>>>the defaults.
>>>
>>    
>>
>
>No one is being misled here.  In fact, my implementation only uses
>stable Fedora rpms from the base and update repositories.  David is
>implementing a good solution.  I was using lilo on both FC1 and FC2
>without problems.  In fact, it never really made much sense to me for
>Fedora to offer RAID during the install and then not provide a valid
>RAID-compatible boot image automatically across all drives (it did on
>FC1 because lilo was still an option). Maybe grub2 will prove more
>promising.
>
>--
>
>Shawn 
>
>
>  
>
Thanks, Shawn.  "Couldn't have said it better myself."

I mainly wanted to point out that lilo supports RAID 1 *natively*.  No 
fuss, no custom scripts, etc.; it "just works." 

If someone is a grub developer and they want to help implement software 
RAID support in grub, they should have at it.  On the other hand, if 
someone wants a simple, easy to install and maintain implementation of 
software RAID for Fedora, they should use lilo for their boot loader; 
not grub.  The current incarnation of grub doesn't inherently support 
software RAID and that support needs to be there if folks like Fedora 
are going to offer lvm and RAID 1 as an install option for /boot.  
Sadly, lots of people out there with stock installs of Fedora probably 
think that their system will survive a hit to their system disk because 
they think that software RAID 1 will keep it running.

When I installed the system I copied my lilo.conf from I performed the 
following test: in turn, I unplugged each drive's IDE ribbon cable and 
then powered up the system.  lilo performed flawlessly brining up the 
system in "degraded mode" regardless of which of the two disks in the 
mirror set was available and with no user intervention.  This was with 
no special preparation on my part other than simply configuring lilo to 
use /dev/md* as needed.  Again, lilo just works.

BTW, the box I copied my lilo.conf from is running White Box Linux; not 
FC 1 or 2.  It's my server so I want stable.  Also, since it's my 
server, I don't want or need a lot of grub's features on this system 
since I would consider almost *any* of the boot interventions grub 
allows to mean the system has significant problems and needs to be 
"fixed."  On the other hand, grub works great on my HP notebook with FC4 
x86_64 since it allows me to easily mess with the boot parameters (which 
is needed on an all too frequent basis).

Cheers,
Dave