[syslinux] [extlinux] Failed to load ldlinux.c32 with btrfs subvolume

H. Peter Anvin hpa at zytor.com
Tue Oct 1 14:52:58 PDT 2019


On 2019-09-30 16:09, Erik via Syslinux wrote:
> I am new to syslinux/extlinux. Can I boot from a linux btrfs subvolume? I am
> getting "Failed to load ldlinux.c32" when I attempt to boot from a btrfs
> subvolume.

I can confirm this as a problem. The algorithm for btrfs subvolume search
seems to be completely braindead, and at least in the current Linux kernels
there are ioctls that perform the entire subvolume identification for us;
unfortunately they were added quite recently (kernel 4.18), but perhaps that
is recent enough to do something saner than what we have now.

Even worse, due to *another* bug, we don't even execute the subvolume search
code (which appears to only search for the default subvolume for some reason,
too) at all.

Either way, *in general*, I recommend putting /boot on a separate partition
anyway; there are some BIOSes which have problems accessing disks beyond some
point, and putting /boot on a smallish separate partition at the beginning of
the disk avoids that problem.

That being said, there is absolutely no question that this is a problem, and
it needs to be fixed. There is also no reason to use the subvolume name (which
consumes precious space in the very early boot code) as we currently do;
storing the subvolume ID is far more efficient.

If I'm reading the code correctly, it currently expects the root of the btrfs
mount tree to be the default subvolume, so the problem occurs when the root of
the tree of the mounted device is not the default subvolume. You could work
around this by using "btrfs subvolume set-default" around the call to
extlinux. You might even want to consider if that doesn't make sense in
general for the preferred root of your filesystem.

	-hpa


More information about the Syslinux mailing list