palo not working on ext2/ext3 partitions

I recently had the pleasure of a complete reinstall and found that I can't set up palo on the new system (at least not palo that loads from an ext2/ext3 filesystem). The problem doesn't seem to be within palo itself, but the fact that mke2fs is no longer working for us. The symptom I see is that after a couple of uses the palo partition corrupts itself and then e2fsck destroys the iplboot stored in the badblocks list.

The problem seems to be with the badblock list because if I do

palo -I /dev/sdb

Followed by a fsck -f on the palo partition, it finds errors and wants to clear the badblock inode.

I can reproduce this simply by doing

dd if=/dev/zero of=bbtest.img bs=1M count=100
losetup /dev/loop0 bbtest.img
a=237; while [ $a -le 450 ]; do echo $a >> bblist.txt; a=$[$a+1]; done mke2fs -b 1024 -l /home/jejb/bblist.txt /dev/loop0
e2fsck -f /dev/loop0

With no palo involvement, so I don't think it's our fault.

I'll take this to the ext2 tools development list. Whatever it is seems to be really old because I unearthed an mke2fs from 2011 that still has the problem.

Quoted 30 lines · James Bottomley

I recently had the pleasure of a complete reinstall and found that I
can't set up palo on the new system (at least not palo that loads from
an ext2/ext3 filesystem). The problem doesn't seem to be within palo
itself, but the fact that mke2fs is no longer working for us. The symptom I see is that after a couple of uses the palo partition corrupts itself and then e2fsck destroys the iplboot stored in the badblocks list.

The problem seems to be with the badblock list because if I do

palo -I /dev/sdb

Followed by a fsck -f on the palo partition, it finds errors and wants
to clear the badblock inode.

I can reproduce this simply by doing

dd if=/dev/zero of=bbtest.img bs=1M count=100
losetup /dev/loop0 bbtest.img
a=237; while [ $a -le 450 ]; do echo $a >> bblist.txt; a=$[$a+1]; done
mke2fs -b 1024 -l /home/jejb/bblist.txt /dev/loop0 e2fsck -f /dev/loop0

With no palo involvement, so I don't think it's our fault.

Quoted 3 lines

I'll take this to the ext2 tools development list. Whatever it is seems to be really old because I unearthed an mke2fs from 2011 that still has the problem.

Thanks for trying to fix it.
I'm not using this boot-from-extfs feature on any of my machines. All boot from a palo partition, so I agree, that hasn't been tested much.

Empirically, I've found that as long as the badblocks don't include any block from 0-250 ext2/3 seems to be happy creating a valid filesystem. Unfortunately with the label being 64k (so even if the palo partition is first it starts at an offset of 64k) and our alignment being on 256k absolute, we usually end up starting the badblocks at around block 224.