Bug#463236: grub: does not support 256 byte inodes on ext3.

[Stefan Lippers-Hollmann]

Package: grub
Version: 0.97-29
Severity: normal

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Hi

ext3 filesystems with an inode size of 256 byte cannot be read by the 
read-only file system code of grub 0.97-29 (e2fs_stage1_5 can't be loaded).

Following up #463123 "e2fsprogs: grub 0.97 cannot boot ext3 filesystems 
with an inode size of 256 byte", I have reviewed the grub patches by Jesse 
Keating <jkeating at redhat.com> and Eric Sandeen <esandeen at redhat.com> 
staging up for Fedora 9:
http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/viewcvs/devel/grub/grub-support-256byte-inode.patch?view=markup
which depends upon
http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/viewcvs/devel/grub/grub-fedora-9.patch?view=markup
and came up with the attached patch, which allows grub(-legacy) 0.97 to 
boot from ext3 partitions with 256 byte inodes.

Even though I understand that grub(-legacy) is in feature freeze (grub2 
does already support booting from ext3 partitions with 256 byte inodes), I 
personally would prefer an update to grub 0.97, given that this issue 
leaves the (newly installed/ moved) system unbootable without any chance 
for manual interaction (grub neither installs and dies without any message)
and that the patch seems to be of reasonable size, while grub2 doesn't seem
to be ready for mass deployment.

The attached patch has been tested on several amd64 and i386 systems of 
varying (ext3) filesystem age and seems to work well with 128 byte and 256 
byte inode sizes.

Regards
	Stefan Lippers-Hollmann

CC'ing debian-boot on request of Robert Millan

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.24-slh64-smp-1 (SMP w/2 CPU cores; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

-- no debconf information
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