Hi Lukas, And thanks for your mail. I'm adding debian-boot@ for their information. Lukas Schwaighofer <lukas@schwaighofer.name> (2017-10-17): > as it turns out, syslinux in stretch is in a quite sorry state. To > summarize: > > 1. Booting from ext4 partitions created with Debian stretch does not > work, because ext4's 64bit feature is enabled by default (since > Debian stretch) and not supported by syslinux [1]. > 2. Booting from btrfs does not work [2]. > 3. A bug in the isolinux isohybrid MBR causing boot failures with some > old BIOS [3]. > 4. Booting from xfs does not work (which was already the case in > jessie, so not a regression in stretch) [4]. > > You will notice that this does not really leave any modern Unix > filesystem for syslinux/extlinux to boot from… from the above problems, > 1-3 are a regression compared to Debian jessie. > > [1] https://bugs.debian.org/833057 > [2] https://bugs.debian.org/865462 > [3] I didn't think to open a separate bug against syslinux, which would > have been the right thing to do… the bug against debian-cd, which > is affected by this problem, holds relevant information: > https://bugs.debian.org/857597 It might be a good idea to have a bug report against syslinux as well, which can be used for version tracking purposes, which is most appreciated by people handling stable-proposed-updates requests (we usually consider this mandatory, even if we sometimes let a few exceptions go through). > [4] https://bugs.debian.org/803938 > > > Problems 1 and 2 have an upstream fix each [5, 6] which is pretty small > in size. I'm able to locally reproduce each of the two problems and > also confirm that the respective patches fix the problems. On top of the stretch package? It's always reassuring for stable release managers to have people actually test packages for stable. > Problem 3 also has a small and self-contained upstream fix. And > although I have no way to test this myself, the built isohdpfx.bin file > (with the fix applied) is identical to a known-good and tested version. That seems reassuring enough as far as I'm concerned. > Problem 4 is fixed upstream as well (which I have not tested yet), but > the number of changes for that is pretty high. Since this is both a > large patch and a not a regression from jessie, I don't intend to fix > this in Debian stretch. That seems like an appropriate course of action indeed. > [5] http://git.zytor.com/syslinux/syslinux.git/commit/?id=af7e95c32cea40c1e443ae301e64b27f068b4915 > [6] http://git.zytor.com/syslinux/syslinux.git/commit/?id=548386049cd41e887079cdb904d3954365eb28f3 > > > The current version in unstable contains the patches for 2 and 3 > already and I've just requested sponsorship for another update which > also fixes 1. Provided we do not find any regressions related to the > fixes for problems 1-3, I would like to push those patches [7, 8, 9] > to the version in Debian stretch in the next point release. > > I know the next point release is still ~6 weeks off, but bootloader > changes are obviously critical. So I wanted to raise this issue well > before the deadline to get an idea how (or if) I should proceed: > > * Is this a reasonable request, or are these changes too dangerous > for a point release anyways? Your proposed changes fit the stable-proposed-updates criteria exactly, with fixes in unstable, backports/cherry-picks to stretch already tested and confirmed good, and reasonably-sized diffs. Really nice! > * What kind of testing is required / expected so these changes can be > considered? I think debian-cd@ is most qualified on this topic, I'm not sure d-i uses syslinux for many things except for booting from an ISO anyway. Consequently, what follows is just generic advice: If you get a green light from debian-cd@, I think you only need to: - open a bug report for bug #3 (see my first paragraph); - open a pu request with a source debdiff against the package in stretch with an appropriate version number (probably 3:6.03+dfsg-14.1+deb9u1); including as many details as in this mail would probably do the trick. KiBi.
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