On Fri, Oct 10, 2025, at 2:02 PM, 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.
Unintuitively, booting with rd.break=pre-mount and then merely mounting the xfs boot volume and then rebooting would have fixed it. Log replay would have happened on mount, making the grub.cfg appear in the metadata that GRUB can read. > 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. Yeah this was discussed as a joke on the xfs list at the time. There's no way to maintain this for any file system. -- Chris Murphy -- _______________________________________________ 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
