Bug#451701: grub: boot sector code is not automatically updated, resulting in boot trouble with 2.6.23

Marc Haber mh+debian-bugs at zugschlus.de
Sat Nov 17 20:35:28 UTC 2007


Package: grub
Version: 0.97-29
Severity: normal

Hi,

this bug is mostly meant as reference for other people who fall into
this pit, please do not close even if you do not intend to fix it.

Recently, with 2.6.23.something, the Linux kernel binary format has
been changed in a way that older (I am not sure whether sarge's grub
is affected) grub code cannot boot it: Boot terminates with "No setup
signature found" or "Setup signature not found".

Since the grub package does not have maintainer scripts that update
the boot sector automatically, and no documentation suggests running
grub-install after updating the package, this will kill reboot of all
systems that were installed long ago (I suspect pre-sarge), and will
now be updated to 2.6.23.something (verified with .8).

While the fix, a new grub-install, is trivial, people need to be aware
of this issue.

On the technical side, I'd like to suggest that the grub package
verifies on postinst that the boot sector holds _current_ grub code
and displays a big fat warning, reminding the user to execute
grub-install manually, or offering to do this for the user during
postinst automatically, to avoid incompatibilities like this in the
future.

At least, this needs to be prominently documented in NEWS.Debian or
README.Debian. This issue has caused me a nightmare service window
today since all my test systems were young enough to have 2.6.23.x
compatible grub boot sector code. The first two productive systems
were older than that.

Greetings
Marc

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.23.1-scyw00225 (PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages grub depends on:
ii  libc6                     2.6.1-6        GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libncurses5               5.6+20071013-1 Shared libraries for terminal hand

grub recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information





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