Robert Millan wrote: > Rob, > > Did you hit this problem when installing GRUB to a partition, or to the > whole disk?
I was upgrading from etch to lenny on a box where / is XFS and /boot and /var are on the same partition. GRUB is installed into the MBR. I know you can't install bootloaders onto XFS partitions. (If that had happened, based on previous experience the FS would've panicked and all IO returned with an error, so I'd probably have been able to log in and get a lot of errors, assuming bash was still in the cache. :D) So no, it's nothing to do with where I'm trying to install GRUB to, the problem is the Debian patch to grub-install did xfs_freeze on my root filesystem and then did various crap including trying to write to the log file (and make a /boot/grub/default file, I think?), all of which go into D state while the filesystem is frozen so don't finish, and meanwhile everything else on my system ground to a halt too. Obviously hard for me to debug given I lost all my access to the system, but asking SysRq for backtraces showed everything was blocked on FS access. (Actually as a result of my experience I think XFS devs are adding an unfreeze SysRq atm...) Just make the script not try do anything at all which might potentially cause a write to the filesystem while it's frozen, is the main thing... Backing out the bullshit XFS Debian patch would do that, applying Ben's might even make it work properly on lenny. Regards, Rob -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-rc-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
