Yaboot failing with JFS in primary partition

[Paul Nasrat]

On Tue, 2006-03-28 at 09:44 +0200, Markus Baertschi wrote:

Please ensure you keep list in CC.

> 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).

Having the precise error message and the output of the same process with
a yaboot built with DEBUG=1 would be useful.  I'll also try and
reproduce here.

> 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.

As this is the first report I've had, I can only assume no-one has been
using yaboot with jfs.

> 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.

Please supply the info above.  Note the final things we try use
OpenFirmware to open the device.  I'd like to improve our handling of
FS's.  And will look at post 1.3.14.

Paul