Re: GRUB and the risk of block list corruption in extX

["Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko" <phcoder@gmail.com>]

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This is not a complete answer but one of my problems is that such requests
don't even suply any kind of reason to go into such installs. We nerd to
consider usecases before even considering using an approach which is known
for some pretty serious problems. Will answer in more details later.
On Feb 7, 2013 11:47 AM, "Martin Wilck" <martin.wilck@ts.fujitsu.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> this is a question about the long-running topic of installing GRUB in
> partitions or partitionless disks.
>
> Recently I have been involved in discussions about this on
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=872826. The Fedora boot
> loader can't be installed in partition headers any more. The major
> reason given by the Fedora developers is the famous GRUB warning
> "blocklists are UNRELIABLE and their use is discouraged."
>
> The Grub manual says "installing to a filesystem means that GRUB is
> vulnerable to its blocks being moved around by filesystem features such
> as tail packing, or even by aggressive fsck implementations".
>
> I'd like to understand how this blocklist corruption might come to pass
> (except for cases where "core.img" itself is moved, deleted, or
> overwritten by user space tools). Also, it has been recommended to
> prevent accidental corruption by setting the IMMUTABLE flag on core.img,
> and I'd like to ask for the GRUB experts' opinion about that.
> Finally I'd like to know if it's true that the GRUB team plans to drop
> block list support altogether in a future version.
>
> Regards
> Martin Wilck
>
> PS: It has been stated that of recent filesystems, this matters most for
> extX, because btrfs has a 64k header where embedding GRUB is usually
> possible. Therefore I asked a similar question on ext4-devel.
>
>
>
> --
> Dr. Martin Wilck
> PRIMERGY System Software Engineer
> x86 Server Engineering
>
> FUJITSU
> Fujitsu Technology Solutions GmbH
> Heinz-Nixdorf-Ring 1
> 33106 Paderborn, Germany
> Phone:                  ++49 5251 525 2796
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> Email:                  martin.wilck@ts.fujitsu.com
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>
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