The "sparse file" errors are a different problem.  It's actually a
misleading error message: what's happening is that GRUB's btrfs
implementation doesn't implement the file read hook interface for
returning blocklists to calling code.  I posted to grub-devel about this
and the upstream maintainer pointed out that, even aside from multi-
device problems, writing to btrfs from GRUB is fundamentally risky
because:

 * the same block may be used by multiple snapshots
 * every tree which uses a given block will contain its checksum, and so on 
recursively

However, btrfs reserves space at the start for the boot loader.  This
space is more than GRUB needs to embed itself, and so we could use 1KB
of it for an environment block.

In any case, this is not a new problem that arose from using subvolumes,
nor does it prevent booting (you get a spurious "Press any key to
continue" prompt, but if you just ignore it it'll boot anyway).  Thus
I'm going to disregard it for the purposes of closing this bug, since I
believe I've committed fixes for all the other problems, and track the
environment block problem separately.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/712029

Title:
  ubiquity btrfs install fails to boot (grub rescue> prompt)

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