On 5/6/19 5:51 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
But it's worth keeping an eye on anomalies. There is the
potential for
goofy things happening. Unrelated to this particular feature, rather
it was grub.cfg being updated, in cases where that update happened
very quickly followed by an immediate reboot, GRUB only saw the
previous grub.cfg. On journaled file systems, the new file gets
written out, and indicated only in the journal, and a particular set
of circumstances preventing the root fs from being cleanly unmounted
resulted in a hidden new grub.cfg that only became revealed after
journal replay by the kernel code. The GRUB code can't read file
system journals, so it was seeing the stale file as a result of
reading stale file system metadata without the benefit of reading the
journal. :P
I may indeed have tripped over that a time or two. I've had cases where strange
things happened following a kernel update / immediate reboot. Given the relative
non-volatility of /boot, it's starting to make sense to use a plain ext2 fs for /boot
rather than a more modern fs.
If I ever have to reload this machine, I may switch to UEFI. While I don't like the
FAT filesystems, their simplicity has an advantage in this application.
Steve