Re: [PATCH] Refuse to install on XFS destroying its superblock

[Felix Zielcke]

Am Samstag, den 17.10.2009, 14:00 +0200 schrieb Robert Millan:
> On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 01:43:37PM +0200, Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko wrote:
> > Robert Millan wrote:
> > > On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 12:18:05AM +0200, Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko 
> > > wrote:
> > >   
> > >>  2009-10-16  Vladimir Serbinenko  <address@hidden>
> > >>  
> > >> +        * util/i386/pc/grub-setup.c (setup): Refuse to overwrite XFS 
> > >> superblock.
> > >> +        (options): New option --destroy-xfs.
> > >> +        (main): Handle --destroy-xfs.
> > >>     
> > >
> > > I gave this some more thought, and I think this could be less ad-hoc.  
> > > We're
> > > treating XFS as if it were a "weird", unique thing just because it isn't 
> > > biased
> > > towards DOS-style boot like most filesystems are.
> > >
> > > Instead, I've done something more generic, using our standard filesystem
> > > probing engine which should be more reliable than a single memcmp.
> > >
> > >   
> > The danger is that fs_probe may reject filesystem as valid just because
> > it's newer than expected.
> 
> What do you mean with "reject filesystem as valid"?

For example with the extN filesystems we reject them as valid if they
use INCOMPAT flags we don't support.
For example external ext3/4 journal devices, which caused a reboot or
segfault or something like that, before we commited Javier's patch for
it.
In that case it doestn't matter because the first sector is still unused
but for other filesystems this could maybe be a problem.



-- 
Felix Zielcke
Proud Debian Maintainer and GNU GRUB developer