Bug#700197: grub-common: /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen should use module --nounzip for initrd

[Lukas Schwaighofer]

Package: grub-common
Version: 1.99-26
Severity: important

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Hi,

Boot entries generated by /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen look like this
(unnecessary parts omitted):

multiboot /boot/xen-4.1-amd64.gz placeholder
module /boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-4-amd64 placeholder [...]
module /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-4-amd64

This causes the last module, which is the initramdisk, to be unzipped by
grub (and not by the linux kernel, which happens when booting without
xen, using the 'linux' and 'initrd' directives).

While this usually isn't a problem, the initramdisk may in fact contain
multiple concatenated archives (see
http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/early-userspace/buffer-format.txt
for details). If that's the case and the first initrd is gzipped, grub
tries to unzip the whole initrd resulting in an error (and an unbootable
system).

I strongly suggest adding --nounzip to the module directive of the
initramdisk. The boot entries should look like this:

multiboot /boot/xen-4.1-amd64.gz placeholder
module /boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-4-amd64 placeholder [...]
module --nounzip /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-4-amd64


Kind regards,
Lukas Schwaighofer

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