Bug#350629: please support root on NFS filesystem

[Micha Lenk]

Package: grub
Version: 0.95+cvs20040624-17
Severity: wishlist

Hello,

I am running grub on a diskless system which mounts it's root filesystem
via nfs. When installing a new kernel image I would like to have my
/boot/grub/menu.lst updated by update-grub but update-grub silently
refuses to update my menu.lst.

I attached a patch which makes update-grub somewhat NFS aware. The patch
lets the function find_device() return /dev/nfs if the first field in
/etc/fstab looks like a NFS mounted share (if it contains a colon). In
the function convert() it bypasses the check for existence of /dev/nfs
and the check for an apropriate device in /boot/grub/devices.map if NFS
is used for the corresponding mount.

It might be usefull having netboot support in install-grub too, so a
call of 'install-grub --recheck' could lead to a line like this

(nd)	/dev/nfs

in /boot/grub/devices.map. This is just an idea, so I didn't try to find
out how to achieve this feature.

Yours
  Micha

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.8-adeos
Locale: LANG=de_DE at euro, LC_CTYPE=de_DE at euro (charmap=ISO-8859-15)

Versions of packages grub depends on:
ii  libc6                       2.3.2.ds1-22 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii  libncurses5                 5.4-4        Shared libraries for terminal hand

-- no debconf information
-------------- next part --------------
--- update-grub	2006-01-30 21:32:33.000000000 +0100
+++ update-grub.nfs-aware	2006-01-30 21:33:26.000000000 +0100
@@ -74,6 +74,9 @@
 			LABEL=* | UUID=*)
 				device=`readlink -f "$(findfs $device)"`
 			;;
+			*:*)
+				device='/dev/nfs'
+			;;
 			*)
 				device=`readlink -f "$device"`
 			;;
@@ -128,6 +131,12 @@
 # Convert an OS device to the corresponding GRUB drive.
 # This part is OS-specific.
 convert () {
+    # Handle NFS device
+    if [ "$1" == "/dev/nfs" ]; then
+	echo "(nd)"
+	exit 0
+    fi
+
     # First, check if the device file exists.
     if test -e "$1"; then
 		: