Yaboot failing with JFS in primary partition

[Markus Baertschi]

I recently had an ugly experience with our main BlueGene Server. We changed
the partiton setup on the boot disk and added a JFS filesystem. After the
chage the system would not boot anymore.

Instead of displaying the boot menu we got an error in the style 'could not
read at offset 0x000' (I don't have the precise message handy).

The IBM support line tracked the problem down to a limitation in yaboot the
is can only tolerate ext2, ext3 and raiser filesystems in the primary
partition table. We eventually solved the problem by creating an extended
partition table for our jfs partition.

I'd like to understand better what happened there and motivate yaboot
development to handle the problem better. Yaboot should either ignore
filesystems it doesn't understand or at the very least display a useful
error message.

Markus
--
  Markus Baertschi             Phone: ++41 (21) 807 1677
  Bas du Rossé 14b             Fax  : ++41 (21) 807 1678
  CH-1163, Etoy                Email: markus at markus.org
  Switzerland                  Homepage: www.markus.org
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