On Fri, 2025-10-10 at 13:02 -0500, Chris Adams wrote: > Once upon a time, Chris Murphy <[email protected]> said: > > As it turns out, GRUB does not do log replay for ext4, XFS or Btrfs. > > Yep, I got bit by this once when I did updates and then something (don't > know what) happened that caused the grub2.cfg update (pre BLS) to still > be in the XFS log. The system would just boot to a grub prompt... I was > on a trip and sitting in a hotel room (so no access to another system, a > rescue USB drive, etc.), and basically hadn't had to mess much with boot > loaders in a long time, so didn't really remember any GRUB2 commands. I > eventually puzzled out enough to get the system booted, but it was a bit > of a pain. > > The ideal solution would be for the GRUB2 (or any boot loader) FS > drivers to be able to do journal or log replay in a memory overlay (no > writes to the disk, so if there's a problem the boot loader wouldn't > make it worse), but that's a very non-trivial exercise, plus could take > a good bit more RAM.
Sorry but this is backwards, the only sane solution is to avoid dealing with complex filesystems in grub and move the boot partition to a simpler filesystem that can be kept consistent with no logging involved. I guess that is why VFAT is used for EFI, and should probably be used for grub stuff as well given it is already supported by UEFI and basically any other thing. Adding more complexity into the boot process is not a good idea, rather it should be simplified, perhaps it is time to look at something like systemd-boot and combine it with simpldrm and unified initrd images. It sounds like a lot of change, but radical simplification of the boot process would yield a much more robust system where automatic rescue would also be mush simpler to build. 2c. Simo. -- Simo Sorce Distinguished Engineer RHEL Crypto Team Red Hat, Inc -- _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected] Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
