Thanks to Rob McQueen for doing a lot of research into this for his mail about this bug on 12 Dec 2008. Based on that mail, I've looked through the code in an attempt to find a way to implement a reasonable fix: using FIBMAP as he suggested.
After several hours of working through the source, I give up. It's a total mess and I'd much rather see grub simply removed from Debian altogether than fix this bug and allow it to live on. Highlights: * gratuitous use of nested functions * horrific interfaces that don't pass enough information around internally, leading to: * functions passing internal state around via umarked global variables, relying on side effects * significantly obfuscated code * the core bug as described by Rob: accessing a block device underneath an active filesystem and assuming that the results will be safe and/or correct. I *know* that grub is a bootloader, so it's always going to end up having some nasty lowlevel code somewhere. But that's no excuse for the code quality I've just seen. After this experience, I'm about to remove grub from all my systems. Come back lilo, all is forgiven. -- Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. st...@einval.com Is there anybody out there? -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-rc-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
