Re: [Xen-devel] pygrub fails to read single partition with grub bootsector in 4.1.0-rc

[Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2011-01-31 at 11:59 +0000, M A Young wrote: 
> On Mon, 31 Jan 2011, Ian Campbell wrote:
> 
> > Thanks Michael.
> >
> > On Sun, 2011-01-30 at 19:57 +0000, M A Young wrote:
> >> I have a single partition (actually under lvm) which starts with a grub
> >> boot sector.
> >
> > Do you mean an unpartitioned disk (but with an MBR) as opposed to a disk
> > with a single partition?
> 
> Yes. It is what you get if have grub installed on a partition rather than 
> in an MBR, and then tell xen to map that partition to a partition in the 
> guest.

oh, so you are using the "split disk" scheme where xvda1, xvda2 etc are
configured for the guest separately, as opposed to the "whole disk"
scheme where xvda (possibly including a partition table) is configured,
but you are also doing "grub-install /dev/xvda1" or something similar.

In this scheme I don't really see the benefit of installing grub into
the partition in this way -- nothing will ever be able to make use of
it. Note that installing grub to the partition is not a prerequisite for
having a valid grub configuration under /boot, the latter being all
pygrub requires.

I generally recommend people use the whole disk configuration anyway,
and I would redouble that in cases where pygrub is in use. About the
only time I would recommend the split disk configuration is where you
have the guest kernels etc stored in domain 0's filesystem.

I think that the correct solution would be for pygrub to be passed an
option by the toolstack which indicates that it is being asked to
operate explicitly on a split disk partition and not a whole disk, and
therefore skip all the partition detecting stuff. I don't know if pygrub
can infer this from the existing options it gets and I suspect that
adding it would be a rather intrusive patch. Your patch seems like a
viable workaround.

Ian.


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