Re: Guix bios installation: Grub error: unknown filesystem

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Ada,

Ada Stevenson <adanskana@gmail.com> skribis:

> Basically, there is a compatibility issue regarding the ext4
> filesystem features that GRUB 2.06 supports and the features that
> `e2fsprogs@1.47.0` enables by default when creating your ext4
> filesystem. When these features are enabled, it changes the structure
> of the filesystem enough that GRUB can't recognise it properly and it
> fails.
>
> To fix this, you will need to make sure you create your ext4
> filesystem with the following features:
> `mkfs.ext4 /dev/you-partition-here -O
> has_journal,ext_attr,resize_inode,dir_index,filetype,needs_recovery,extent,flex_bg,sparse_super,large_file,huge_file,uninit_bg,dir_nlink,extra_isize`
>
> These are the features that worked for me. I had to do a lot of trial
> and error, and I used `tune2fs -l` to see what features weren't
> supported. The ones I can remember are the metadata_csum features, and
> some other ones (they showed up as FEATURE_X when running `tune2fs` on
> my Guix installation image, so I used a Gparted Live CD to get rid of
> the features that weren't recognised by tune2fs).
>
> This should allow grub to recognise your filesystem during the
> installation process. I think using a later version of grub would fix
> this, but that hasn't happened yet. I think there's a patch to upgrade
> it in `core-updates` somewhere, but I'm not sure.

Just recently I noticed that our installation tests had starting failing
with that exact same ‘grub-install’ error that was mentioned:

  https://ci.guix.gnu.org/build/3708453/details

Cuirass says the culprit is in the 4003c60..daab3da, which indeed
includes the e2fsprogs update to 1.47.0.

Have you tried upgrading GRUB?  I see ‘guix refresh grub’ finds a new
version.  If fixing the bug is what it takes, we should do that.

Thanks for the investigation!

Ludo’.