During my 11.1 install (upgrade via format of system from 11.0 actually) I noticed a helpful error before I sent the install on its way stating that my choice of a root filesystem (xfs) would not boot. Now, being unadventurous with a significant-other’s computer I chose to make / reiserfs and left /home as xfs and all is well, but I’m wondering two things. First, is this warning accurate? Second, will 11.1 really fail to boot while 11.0 did not when xfs is the boot partition?
Thanks.
A search with “grub xfs boot” turned up this:
[RFE] Installing grub into an XFS partition](http://www.mail-archive.com/bug-grub@gnu.org/msg10770.html)
which seems to indicate that GRUB doesn’t work without some special treatment on XFS boot partitions. If you really wanted XFS for /, I suppose you could follow that method, or just make a separate ext2 /boot.
I learn something everyday.
I guess I’m just surprised I could do it the first time (11.0) but not the second (11.1) and am wondering why that partition’s support was removed. Oh well… hopefully support will be back for SLED 11 at least, and if not a tiny ext2 partition isn’t that hard to manage.
I encountered this the first time I installed opensuse 11.1. It gave a red warning that the xfs will not boot. I made root ext.3 and made the others as xfs.
The warning is indeed real. XFS writes the boot sector differently, and installing grub to it can cause data overlap and corrupt the sector.