No support for XFS in Mint's Grub?

[greywolf]

I was just doing a bit of tidying up by removing a couple of old kernels in my Mint 18.3 Xfce system and noticed something I had not seen before about the XFS filesystem. Just wanting to confirm it.

This is a multi-boot machine, I use it to support over 200 users and I have about 5 or 6 different distros installed. All the root partitions are formatted as ext4 except one which has the XFS filesystem on it.

I processed the latest update to the current kernel and decided to get rid of a couple of earlier versions still hanging around. When processing the changes in Synaptic, I happened to turn on the "Details" drop down and noticed an unusual warning condition. When the Grub update is processing it lists the various other installs as it probes them but the one with an XFS filesystem gets a message that says:

Code: Select all

failed to probe /dev/sda6 for filesystem type

Does this mean Mint's version of Grub os-prober does not support XFS filesystem? I assume so because the subsequent Grub menu listing simply misses the distro on that file system?! If that is the case, it is the only distro running on this machine that has that condition. All the others detect the XFS filesystem just fine and add the distro to grub.cfg.

This is not a problem as such in that I just make sure one of the other distro's Grub is installed in the MBR but I was not aware of this before and find it VERY strange that it would be the case? XFS is a significant player in the Linux filesystem world.

Just wondering - perhaps someone could clarify please?

regards,
greywolf.

[xenopeek]

In the past GRUB hadn't kept up with XFS' changing on disk format and could indeed not boot from XFS formatted boot partitions: https://unix.stackexchange.com/question ... 310#230310. There are a few changes in GRUB late 2015 http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs ... /changelog that reference the cherry picking patches to support changed on disk XFS format.

Whether your current issue is related to that or not I can't say.

[greywolf]

Thanks @xenopeek, some interesting reading there.

It must be more to do with the version of Grub, as some distros using Grub detect the Xfs partition whereas Mint's does not. I might check the version number of grub on each setup when I have a moment? Not that it is a problem as I have standardised on reFind as my boot loader anyway and it has no problems in this regard.
Will mark as solved.

Regards,
greywolf