Re: Grub, sparc64, and compressed kernels

[Chris Ross <cross+debian@distal.com>]

On Tue, Jul 03, 2018 at 03:37:24PM -0400, Chris Ross wrote:
> Sorry, stupid user trick.  I had mdadm and friends in the disk I was running
> on, but had _not_ installed those packages into the environment in md/ZFS
> that I chrooted into.  After installing mdadm (and the collection it brought),
> I am able to update-grub.  And grub-probe gives me the answer I'd expect:
> 
> But, I'm seeing the following if I try to grub-install:
> 
> (chroot) root@t5120# grub-install --force --skip-fs-probe /dev/md0
> Installing for sparc64-ieee1275 platform.
> grub-install: warning: File system `ext2' doesn't support embedding.
> grub-install: warning: Embedding is not possible.  GRUB can only be installed in this setup by using blocklists.  However, blocklists are UNRELIABLE and their use is discouraged..
> zsh: segmentation fault  grub-install --force --skip-fs-probe /dev/md0
> 
> (1) Is this supposed to work?
> (2) Assuming it's not actually installed correctly yet, booting will fail.
>     Should I grub-install onto /dev/sda1 or /dev/sda2?  Whether one or both,
>     won't that mess up the RAID of those devices?

Adrian answered some of this before I asked the above questions:

On Tue, Jul 03, 2018 at 09:39:56PM +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> Well, you need to tell GRUB to install on the individual disks
> and not on the RAID (md0), this won't work - with any boot loader.
> [...]
> Don't use /dev/md0, use /dev/sd* and install on any of the disks that
> are part of the RAID. You cannot boot from /dev/md0 as the kernel needs
> to be running to be able to access the software RAID device.

Okay.  That all makes sense, thank you.  Two problems at this point
(1) The segv above.  I'm doing something wrong, but it shouldn't SEGV
(2) Installing onto /dev/sda1 doesn't work.

t5120# grub-install /dev/sda1                
Installing for sparc64-ieee1275 platform.
grub-install: warning: File system `ext2' doesn't support embedding.
grub-install: error: embedding is not possible, but this is required for RAID and LVM install.
t5120# grub-install --force --skip-fs-probe /dev/sda1
Installing for sparc64-ieee1275 platform.
grub-install: warning: File system `ext2' doesn't support embedding.
grub-install: error: embedding is not possible, but this is required for RAID and LVM install.
t5120# 

Is there some other options for grub-install I'm missing?  Embedding
(grub-install /dev/sda) isn't possible with sun partition labels, but the
above message suggests that embedding is required for RAID install.

Thanks...

                         - Chris