Re: nasty bug in /usr/sbin/grub-probe
On 4/3/22 11:04 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> Hi Stan!
>
> On 4/3/22 16:39, Stan Johnson wrote:
>> If this problem is expected to occur on an Ultra 5 or an Ultra 30,
>> please let me know and I'll be happy to help with a git bisect, using a
>> spare 9 GB disk for the installation.
>
> I think you should see the issue on both the Ultra 5 and Ultra 30.
> ...
I wasn't able to get my Ultra 5 working; the video signal kept cycling
on and off for some reason, and the CD drive wasn't seen, though it was
seen well enough to boot the installation and get to the point where it
said no CD drive was found.
But I was able to confirm that the "grub-probe" bug doesn't seem to
affect the Ultra 30.
On the Ultra 30, the 28 Mar 2022 sparc64 CD booted, and a default
installation, with guided entire-disk partitioning, worked. GRUB also
works, including update-grub and grub-probe.
Disk layout:
# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 136.73 GiB, 146815737856 bytes, 286749488 sectors
Disk model: ST3146807LC
Geometry: 255 heads, 2 sectors/track, 37965 cylinders
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: sun
Device Start End Sectors Size Id Type Flags
/dev/sda1 0 1000109 1000110 488.3M 1 Boot
/dev/sda2 1000110 284748299 283748190 135.3G 83 Linux native
/dev/sda3 0 286749029 286749030 136.7G 5 Whole disk
/dev/sda4 284748300 286749029 2000730 976.9M 82 Linux swap
After setting "GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false" in /etc/default/grub,
update-grub also works as expected:
# update-grub
Generating grub configuration file ...
Found background image: /usr/share/images/desktop-base/desktop-grub.png
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinux-5.16.0-6-sparc64
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.16.0-6-sparc64
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinux-5.16.0-5-sparc64
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.16.0-5-sparc64
Warning: os-prober will be executed to detect other bootable partitions.
Its output will be used to detect bootable binaries on them and create
new boot entries.
done
# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
udev 749800 0 749800 0% /dev
tmpfs 153120 912 152208 1% /run
/dev/sda2 138536344 2884840 128541416 3% /
tmpfs 765592 0 765592 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5120 8 5112 1% /run/lock
/dev/sda1 466027 98003 343039 23% /boot
tmpfs 153112 72 153040 1% /run/user/111
tmpfs 153112 64 153048 1% /run/user/1000
Here, grub-probe doesn't crash, but I may not be using the right
arguments to trigger the crash:
# grub-probe /boot
ext2
# grub-probe -d /dev/sda1
ext2
# grub-probe -d /dev/sda2
ext2
Note: /dev/sda2 is actually ext4.
-----
There were a few oddities, but only #6 is serious (apparently a libc
bug, not a kernel bug).
1) I see that /dev/sda1 is mounted as /boot, not /boot/grub. So all the
kernels will end up in /dev/sda1. I haven't tested how (or whether) that
will affect kernels for other operating systems (e.g. Gentoo).
2) Please confirm that grub-install never needs to be run. It appears
not to be needed, since update-grub updates /boot/grub/grub.cfg directly.
3) At system boot, when GRUB runs, it complains that it is out of
memory, but it seems to work anyway.
4) During installation, the disk partitioner said "The disk has 562253
cylinders which is greater than the maximum of 65536.", but that error
didn't seem to affect anything.
5) Before the installation, I had two Seagate 146 GB ST3146807LC disks
installed. I replaced those disks with one 300 GB ST3300007LC disk.
Although all the disks are Ultra U320 drives, the 300 GB disk wasn't
seen by the installation CD, though it is seen as Target 0 by
"scsi-probe" in the Sun PROM. For the installation, I re-installed one
of the 146 GB disks as Target 0. I'll check later to see whether the 300
GB drive is seen by the installed system.
6) In Xfce, a login at the console worked once, but it is now failing
consistently (even after a reboot), with this error message in dmesg:
xfce4-session[3980]: segfault at 0 ip fffff8010263c9b4 (rpc
fffff801020efbb8) sp 000007feff8dc451 error 1 in
libc-2.33.so[fffff801025b0000+164000]
I'll be running memtester to rule out bad memory. AFAIK, Xfce is the
only desktop (in Debian) that works with my choice of init (sysvinit),
so I'll likely end up using a text-only system on the Ultra 30 for
Debian SID; I can always boot Debian 7.8 or a different distribution if
I need an X desktop.
-Stan
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