Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 124769
Installer hangs when installing grub on XFS partitions
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:43 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113 Description of problem: If you try to install on a xfs partition , everything goes ok. After all packages are installed , anaconda hangs on "Installing boot loader". Switching to the virtual terminals show grub has been run , but didnt finish. Running top on vt2 shows grub using 99% of the CPU. Doing a killall -TERM grub enables the installation to finish properly. (after killing grub , I did a chroot /mnt/sysimage ; /sbin/grub-install /dev/hda and it worked perfectly). Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): grub-0.94-5 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install on a XFS partition 2. Wait for the package installation to finish. 3. Actual Results: Installation hangs waiting for grub to finish. (It hangs showing the "Installing bootloader" screen) Expected Results: Install shouldnt hang. Additional info: This bug has been confirmed with at least two other people.
Eric -- any thoughts or insights?
I'm guessing that this is still a problem with the fact that grub expects the same view of bits via the raw device and via the filesystem. Grub copies stuff through the xfs filesystem, then expects to go off and read the device directly with it's own xfs filesystem smarts. IIRC I've seen grub get into an infinite loop when the view through the raw device was not in sync, essentially meaning that the filesystem "looked" corrupt and grub got off in the weeds. FC2/anaconda had some attempts to really freeze and sync the filesystem so that all bits were really viewable via the raw device, but looks like maybe there is still a window there. I really should go talk to the grub folks; this seems like a fundamental grub problem, although I'm not sure why xfs is so good at hitting it :)
Yeah, that was all I could think of as well -- I have added the bits to freeze/thaw as should be appropriate, so I'm not quite sure why that's not enough.
Just to add some info. Just installed FC3T1 and this problem still happens.. Had to kill grub and then reinstall it (both grub-install and running root (hd0,0) , setup (hd0) inside grub worked) Also , found a duplicate bug on the same subject: 117776 (there's also 117968 , but it has been closed as "rawhide")
I just installed FC3test2 and the problem still exists.
Fedora Core 2 is now maintained by the Fedora Legacy project for security updates only. If this problem is a security issue, please reopen and reassign to the Fedora Legacy product. If it is not a security issue and hasn't been resolved in the current FC3 updates or in the FC4 test release, reopen and change the version to match.