Bugzilla Bug 216307

I recently upgraded my notebook to grub-0.97-r5 and saw the message appearing
at the end of the ebuild to upgrade my grub stages as well. So I did in the
grub shell and on the next boot, the kernel complained about not finding my
root device "hda3\n". The \n in there caught my attention and I looked at my
home computer to see what is different there because I upgraded my grub stages
on it as well.

The difference was obvious: The root= option isn't the last one on my home
computer so the kernel didn't complain about not finding the root partition. To
fix the issue on my notebook I simply appended another option after the root=
option.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. install sys-boot/grub-0.97-r5
2. update the grub stages using the grub shell
3. have root= as your last boot option
4. reboot

Actual Results:  
The kernel doesn't boot.

Expected Results:  
The kernel should boot.

There are some things I don't know:
1) Maybe earlier grub versions are affected too, I just tested with 0.97-r5.
2) Maybe this is a kernel bug. I tested with gentoo-sources-2.6.24-r3 and -r4.

I am having a similar problem, except I don't see a newline, but just some
garbled text (I do have a newline in my menu.lst though). After upgrading to
grub-0.97-r5 from 0.97-r4, and rewriting the MBR, this is what I get when Linux
starts:

...
Starting balanced_irq
Using IPI Shortcut mode
<3 garbled characters> or unknown-block(0,0)<22 garbled characters>
Please append a correct "root=" boot option; here are the available partitions:
0300    4194302 hda driver: ide-cdrom
0340    4194302 hdb driver: ide-cdrom
0800  195359927 sda driver: sd
  0801   41945683 sda1
  0802          1 sda2
  0803   95739367 sda3
  0805      40131 sda5
  0806     506016 sda6
  0807   30909028 sda7
0810  312571224 sdb driver: sd
  0811  312568641 sdb1
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0) 

The garbled text is always the same (I just don't know how to reproduce all
those funky characters).

I'm also running gentoo-sources-2.6.22-r4 so this is not kernel-specific it
seems. Downgrading to grub-0.97-r4 (and again rewriting MBR) makes my system
boot again.

Also, pressing 'e' in the GRUB menu to edit the kernel line and then booting
has the same problem, so the problem does not seem to be merely reading the
menu.lst file, but rather maybe passing the args to the kernel (maybe not
null-terminated? just guessing here).

I had the same problem with grub-0.97-r5 and 2.6.23-gentoo-r6.
Going back to grub-0.97-r4 stops the kernel panic.

So it is junk appended at the end. I didn't know since it just looked like a
newline in my case.

I had the same issue as Hans (#2).  Reverting to grub-0.97-r4 fixed the issue.

Confirmed; reinstalling the MBR with grub didn't seem to help, either.

I have the same problem too.
$ dmesg | head
Command line: root=/dev/sda8 video=uvesafb:1024x768-32,mtrr:3,ywrap
acpi_sleep=s3_bios softlevel=ethwirelessonly??K?1???q??H?S?d???

The last option is softlevel=ethwirelessonly, but you can see there are junk
after that option.

btw: I found Bug 216364 is same with this.

I've narrowed this down to a patch that was added to to -r5 to allow long
kernel commandlines (see #183443). Not applying this patch makes it all work
again. I'll leave a comment there pointing to this bug.

I will check this out.
Can you please attach the grub.conf entry which causes the issues?

Created an attachment (id=148825) [details]
Grub configuration file

This is the grub.conf that I currently use that exhibits the problem (I've
selected the binary content-type to make sure nothing gets mangled just in case
my grub.conf is actually malformed or something)

Created an attachment (id=148837) [details]
550_all_grub-0.97-long-commandline.patch

Oh!
So short... :)

I believe I found the problem, updated patch.

Created an attachment (id=148840) [details]
550_all_grub-0.97-long-commandline.patch.diff

Incremental diff.

*** Bug 216364 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Ran into this one also

*** Bug 216507 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

robbat2: Do you want me to bump grub with updated patch?

alonbl: it will be there, i'm just working on another grub bug to release at
the same time.

alonbl et al: I just updated the patchset in -r5 for now to contain this fix,
there will be a revbump when I solve bug 215799.

This is in the newer -r5.
PATCHVER="1.7"

I still get this even with -r5 (yes, I reinstalled using the
grubshell+root()+setup()). I've also tried adding a space at the end of my
kernel options, which adds a space before the garbage, si ti looks like this:

$ dmesg |head
Linux version 2.6.24 (klausman@deckard) (gcc version 4.2.4 (Gentoo 4.2.4 p1.0))
#11 SMP Wed Jun 4 19:42:48 CEST 2008
Command line: root=/dev/sda1 video=vesafb:mtrr:3 vga=795 é{þÿÿLd$H¾T
BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
...

Relevant menu.lst entry:
title Linux (2.6.24)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24 root=/dev/sda1 video=vesafb:mtrr:3 vga=795


emerge --info:
Portage 2.1.5.3 (default-linux/amd64/2007.0, gcc-4.2.4, glibc-2.7-r2, 2.6.24
x86_64)
=================================================================
System uname: 2.6.24 x86_64 AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+
Timestamp of tree: Sun, 01 Jun 2008 16:45:01 +0000
distcc 2.18.3 x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (protocols 1 and 2) (default port 3632)
[disabled]
app-shells/bash:     3.2_p39
dev-java/java-config: 1.3.7, 2.1.6
dev-lang/python:     2.5.2-r4
sys-apps/baselayout: 2.0.0
sys-apps/openrc:     0.2.5
sys-apps/sandbox:    1.2.18.1-r2
sys-devel/autoconf:  2.13, 2.62
sys-devel/automake:  1.4_p6, 1.5, 1.7.9-r1, 1.8.5-r3, 1.9.6-r2, 1.10.1-r1
sys-devel/binutils:  2.18-r1
sys-devel/gcc-config: 1.4.0-r4
sys-devel/libtool:   1.5.26
virtual/os-headers:  2.6.25-r3
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="amd64 ~amd64"
CBUILD="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-O2 -march=athlon64 -pipe -msse3"
CHOST="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"
CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/kde/3.5/env /usr/kde/3.5/share/config
/usr/kde/3.5/shutdown /usr/share/config"
CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/ca-certificates.conf /etc/env.d /etc/env.d/java/
/etc/fonts/fonts.conf /etc/gconf /etc/gentoo-release /etc/revdep-rebuild
/etc/terminfo /etc/texmf/web2c /etc/udev/rules.d"
CXXFLAGS="-O2 -march=athlon64 -pipe -msse3"
DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles"
FEATURES="buildsyspkg distlocks parallel-fetch sandbox sfperms strict
unmerge-orphans userfetch userpriv usersandbox"
GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://mirrors.sec.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/gentoo/
http://gentoo.tiscali.nl/"
INSTALL_MASK="/etc/udev/rules.d/75-persistent-net-generator.rules"
LANG="en_US.utf8"
LC_ALL="en_US.utf8"
LDFLAGS=""
MAKEOPTS="-j2"
PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages"
PORTAGE_RSYNC_EXTRA_OPTS="--exclude lost+found"
PORTAGE_RSYNC_OPTS="--recursive --links --safe-links --perms --times --compress
--force --whole-file --delete --stats --timeout=180 --exclude=/distfiles
--exclude=/local --exclude=/packages"
PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp"
PORTDIR="/usr/portage"
PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/portage /usr/portage/local/layman/java-overlay"
SYNC="rsync://rsync5.de.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage"
USE="07/Feb/2008 19:48 3dnow 3dnowext UTC X a52 acl alsa amd64 apache2
audacious audiofile bash-completion berkdb bzip2 calendar cdparanoia cdr cli
cracklib crypt cups dio dri dvd dvdr dvdread encode ethereal exif ffmpeg fftw
firefox fortran ftp gdbm glitz gpm gtk iconv imlib2 isdnlog jpeg kdeenablefinal
ladcca lame lcms lua mad matroska midi mmap mmx mng moznocompose moznoirc
moznomail mozsvg mp3 mpeg mplayer mudflap mysqli ncurses nls nptl nptlonly
offensive ogg opengl openmp pam pcre pdflib perl png ppds pppd python qt4
readline recode reflection session sharedmem sockets sox spl sse sse2 ssl svg
szip tcpd tetex theora unicode usb v4l v4l2 vcd vim vim-pager vlm vorbis wmf
xcb xcomposite xorg xosd xpm xscreensaver xvid zlib" ALSA_CARDS="emu10k1
ice1724" ALSA_PCM_PLUGINS="adpcm alaw asym copy dmix dshare dsnoop empty
extplug file hooks iec958 ioplug ladspa lfloat linear meter mulaw multi null
plug rate route share shm softvol" APACHE2_MODULES="actions alias auth_basic
authn_alias authn_anon authn_dbm authn_default authn_file authz_dbm
authz_default authz_groupfile authz_host authz_owner authz_user autoindex cache
dav dav_fs dav_lock deflate dir disk_cache env expires ext_filter file_cache
filter headers include info log_config logio mem_cache mime mime_magic
negotiation rewrite setenvif speling status unique_id userdir usertrack
vhost_alias" CAMERAS="ptp2" ELIBC="glibc" INPUT_DEVICES="keyboard mouse wacom"
KERNEL="linux" LCD_DEVICES="bayrad cfontz cfontz633 glk hd44780 lb216 lcdm001
mtxorb ncurses text" USERLAND="GNU" VIDEO_CARDS="vesa nvidia"
Unset:  CPPFLAGS, CTARGET, EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS, LINGUAS, PORTAGE_COMPRESS,
PORTAGE_COMPRESS_FLAGS

klausman: Please re-emerge the package, as per comment#18, there was a fix
without revbump.

alon.barlev: I had him re-open it because he reported to me in #-dev first,
that doing the re-merge as well as the update didn't seem to fix it at all for
him.

I merged -r6 today and the problem went away. As such I probably had a sync
fail and got the old -r5. Apologies for wasting your time (and hooray for
revbumps :)).

*** Bug 222091 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***