On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 5:24 PM, Frank Steinmetzger <war...@gmx.de> wrote: > On Sun, Apr 08, 2012 at 01:21:05PM -0500, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote: > >> Note, however, that you *need* GRUB2 if your kernel lives in an ext4 >> partition that it's not longer compatible with ext3. Don't do the >> change without migrating to GRUB2 before. > > Hm... I wonder what I’m missing in my setup. I still run grub-0.97 (I like it > more because it loads faster than Grub 2 ^^). Anyhoo, I have /boot on my root > partition, and a longer while ago I made the switch from ext3 to ext4 through > backup, reformat and restore. According to dumpe2fs, I have the following > features enabled on the partition in question: > > has_journal ext_attr resize_inode dir_index filetype needs_recovery extent > flex_bg sparse_super large_file huge_file uninit_bg dir_nlink extra_isize > > My fstab entry is minimalist: > /dev/sda3 / ext4 auto 0 1 > > So how did I manage to get the system booted with grub 0.97 in the first > place? I’m not using an “init thingy” BTW. ;-)
As I said in my last email: OK, I went out and did my homework. GRUB legacy upstream doesn't support ext4 partitions (using extents, of course; without extents, they can be mounted as ext3), but Gentoo (as almost any other distribution under the sun) applies a patch to support it. Actually, it applies 37 patches, contained in grub-0.97-patches-1.12.tar.bz2, one of them called 850_all_grub-0.97_ext4.patch, which says: Gentoo bug #250829 - Include support for booting from ext4 partitions. This is the respun and tested patch adapted from http://code.google.com/p/grub4ext4/ so that it will apply with the rest of the Gentoo patches. Tested with: /boot on ext2 /boot on ext3 /boot on ext4 / on ext4 (no seperate /boot) Patch ported by Diego E. Pettenò (flameeyes) Testing by Robin H. Johnson (robbat2) Signed-off-by: Diego E. 'Flameeyes' Pettenò <flamee...@gentoo.org> Signed-off-by: Robin H. Johnson <robb...@gentoo.org> So mistery solved: GRUB legacy in Gentoo supports ext4, but it differs from upstream. When I was doing research for converting my filesystem to ext4, everywhere I looked it said that GRUB legacy doesn't support ext4... because it doesn't. Gentoo patches the sources, but upstream GRUB legacy does not support ext4. So I can finally stop telling people to migrate to GRUB2 if they want to use ext4. Regards. -- Canek Peláez Valdés Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
