Yaboot failing with JFS in primary partition

[Markus Baertschi]

Paul Nasrat wrote:
>> 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 messages I get are the following:
Config file read, 32768 bytes
Config file error: Token is too long near line 0 in file /etc/yaboot.conf
Syntax error or read error config
Welcome to yaboot version 1.3.11.SuSE
Enter "help" to get some basic usage information
boot:
>> 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.
>   
You need jfs in a primary partition to trigger the problem. On a 
standard SuSE install you have
alread boot, / (reiser) and swap, so most people would create an 
extended partition table first and
not see the problem. On Redhat the situation is likely to be similar.

>   
>> 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
>   
Thanks for your support !

Markus

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  Markus Baertschi             Phone: ++41 (21) 807 1677
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