On Thu, Jun 07, 2007 at 09:55:46AM -0400, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> On Thu, 7 Jun 2007 10:51:14 +0200
> Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, Jun 07, 2007 at 01:55:36AM -0600, RJ45 wrote:
> > > 
> > > 
> > > grub does not accept xen.gz
> > > 
> > > I had to uncompress it first, and then it works now.
> > 
> > Strange. I always use compressed kernels with xen.
> > 
> 
> For what it's worth, I've had the same problem on 4.0beta2 with Xen
> 3.0.3.  I had enough other stuff to learn how to do that I didn't fight
> it; I simply uncompressed it and went on to other things.

It is a bug of ffs support in GRUB. Loading a gzipped file results in
different read pattern than uncompressed file, which does not show this
problem.

(the "blockmap" command in Grub is an useful diagnostic tool to see the
read pattern, because it is implemented by reading the file and discarding
the results. You may see that the direct blocks are read fine, but when it
hits the indirect block, it explodes.)

Pavel