Re: Worse yet Re: Whoops! Re: [PATCH] Another semi-critical one... (was Re: towards 0.91 )

[Thierry Laronde]

On Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 11:08:00AM -0800, address@hidden wrote:
> 
> But on the front of making the GRUB shell-based installer "grub-install"
> run more reliably on random systems, I had an idea which I think should
> be used even with the non-journaled filesystems.
> 
> As is, there are GRUB shell-specific features like the "--stage2" option
> in the "setup" command.
> 
> #1:  I think we add a "--mapdump" feature that spits out a simple
> file listing all the blockmaps.  Then we run the final stage of
> the GRUB shell in "grub-install" something like 3 times with short
> delays and compare the results to see if they are all identical (you
> don't even need a terribly nice format, just something you can run a
> binary compare on).  If not, then a simple retry mechanism after a
> delay, and if a few delays don't cause it to settle down, you give up.
> 
> This also has the benefit of ensuring even non-journaled FSes are in
> a stable state.
> 
> #2:  Add at least some support for journals, so that you can at least
> recognize when it's not empty and maybe just error out in a way that
> "grub-install" can then print out "journal not flushed, delaying...",
> puts in a wait, then tries again.  Obviously any such behavior where
> it errors out would only be in the GRUB shell, not the bootloader
> version.

I'm for that kind of solution since :

- the GRUB shell is the only way to create virtual disks (and this is
  indeed a very powerfull ability) so to rely only on the native GRUB is
  not a solution;

- the time efficiency of the GRUB shell is not a problem: one doesn't
  run this 10 times per second ;)

- such solution is not a supplementary Linux hack

FWIW,
-- 
Thierry Laronde (Alceste) <address@hidden>
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