>>I noticed as much. And guess what - it worked!
>
> ok cool, that also confirms what people suspected isgoing on really is
>
> i still wonder about grub using O_DIRECT though for another reason,
> that is corruption/nasties when doing block access on a mounted fs
Yeah, but it's only reading it, not writing it.
Nasties - could happen I guess. Corruption - don't see exactly
how that could happen.
> hch --- can you comment here perhaps? would that be a dafer way to
> go?
>
>>That's nice. Oh well, nothing to worry about, it just means
>>that if you don't have a seperate /boot your root partition
>>will be frozen and unfrozen twice.
>
> freezing a second time w/o much dirty data will be pretty quick and
> painless
Yeah, I can't clock any difference here at all.
>>Right. Well, what I have left to test is what happens if the root
>>and/or /boot partition isn't xfs. I'll only try using ext3 though.
>
> maybe hack the installer to check the fs-type then perhaps and do thr
> freeze only if it's xfs using the ioctl's rather than calling out to
> an external program
Checking the FS type - yes, it involves some hackery pokery but it is
doable. Right now all it does is check if xfs_freeze is installed and
calls it twice each for both / and /boot (one freeze and one unfreeze).
> let me know if you want example code for that
Well, the installer's written in python so I need to call out to an
external program anyway (don't I?) to do the ioctl so I don't see
the win there - it's either calling some_program or xfs_freeze.
To be strict - it's actually not the installer itself I'm hacking on
right now - it's booty, but it's also written in python so the same
applies.
Latest status is that I have tested the following combinations:
/ xfs => works
/ ext3 => works
/, /boot xfs => works
/, /boot ext3 => works
/ xfs, /boot ext3 => works
/ ext3, /boot xfs => works
That's basically all combinations possible using ext3 and/or xfs.
xfs_freeze simply tells us that it only works on xfs if I call it
on an ext3 part and if we don't have any xfs at all then the program
xfs_freeze isn't installed and then it's not called at all.
As soon as I resurrect the x86 distro building machine I'll incoroprate
these changes into the installer there and then there'll be a new DVD
out that works even better now :)
// Stefan
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