[Bug 1918948] Re: Issue in Extended Disk Data retrieval (biosdisk: int 13h/service 48h)

Mon Jun 6 19:03:24 UTC 2022

Thanks a bunch for your great response, very informative!

I'm still considering that your case is different than this LP. For
example, in my case the GRUB BIOS commands *can* read 64-bit LBAs. I
mean, GRUB code is capable of that. I feel that in your case, it's a
FW/BIOS issue, that provides wrong data to GRUB.

When using the AHCI spec, GRUB can send direct ATA commands that query
information directly from disk controller, hence not relying in the BIOS
information right? This way, you end-up circumventing the issue.

If you want to be 100% sure about that, let me know and I'll cook a debug package for you, that shows exactly the info GRUB got from your BIOS =)
(It will take a while though, I'll be off some weeks)

Cheers!

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Title:
  Issue in Extended Disk Data retrieval (biosdisk: int 13h/service 48h)

Status in grub2 package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  We have an user reporting the following issue:

  After an upgrade, grub couldn't boot any kernel. The system is not
  running in UEFI mode, so "grub-pc" is the package used - also it is a
  HW RAID5 setup (Dell machine). The bootloader itself was able to get
  loaded, including all its base modules (hence the bootloader could
  read/write from disk) - also, grub packages were up-to-date and seemed
  properly installed. The following kernels were present/installed
  there: 4.4.0-148, 4.4.0-189, 4.4.0-190, 4.4.0-193, 4.4.0-194 .

  Attempting to boot the most recent version (-194), we got the
  following grub error: "error: attempt read-write outside of disk
  `hd0`" - even dropping to the grub shell and manually trying to load
  the file vmlinuz-4.4.0-194-generic (which was being accessed/seen by
  grub "ext4 module"), we got the mentioned error. Now, if we tried to
  boot *all* the other kernels, we managed to load vmlinuz image for
  them, but not the initrd - in this case we still get the message
  "attempt read-write outside of disk" but grub allows the boot to
  continue, and as expected, Linux will fail due to the lack of the
  ramdisk image.

  After booting from a virtual ISO (Ubuntu installer), we managed to "update-grub", "update-initramfs" and "grub-install", not forgetting to "sync" after all these commands. We previously duplicated all initrds, saving them as initrd.img-<kernel_version>.bk . Even after all that, the exact same symptom was observed in grub. By doing then a complete manual test with all vmlinuz/initrd pairs from grub shell, we noticed that the pair vmlinuz-4.4.0-148/initrd-4.4.0-148.bk were both readable from grub, so we could boot them. For some reason, it failed (later we observed that this kernel is not properly installed, missing a bunch of modules in /lib/modules, like the tg3 network driver). Even with an impaired kernel, from the initramfs shell the following actions were taken that rendered the system to a bootable state:
  (A) We apt-get removed kernels -189 and -190 (and their initrd backups)
  (B) We moved all the remaining vmlinuz/initrd pairs (and their backups) to "/"
  (C) We *copied* all of them back to /boot, with the goal of duplicating the files in the filesystem

  We double-checked the md5 hashes of all the vmlinuz/initrd pairs and
  they matched, so the *same files* are present in "/" and "/boot". We
  also checked vmlinuz-4.4.0-{193,194} md5 hashes against the package
  version, and they matched, so the images are good/healthy. After that
  all of that (we re-executed "update-grub" and "sync)," we got
  repeated/doubled entries in grub: we have one entry for the
  vmlinuz/initrd pair in "/boot" and one for the pair in "/" (the
  original files). The original files *still cannot boot*, grub
  complains with the same error message. The duplicate files on /boot
  can boot normally, we tried kernels -194 and -193 twice, both booted.

  So the (very odd and interesting) problem is: grub can read some files
  and others it cannot read, even we knowing that *all the duplicate
  files are the same* and have proved integrity (i.e., the filesystem
  and the storage controller/disks seems to be healthy). Why? Very
  similar problems were reports in [0] and [1] with no really
  good/definitive answer.

  HYPOTHESIS:

  I think this has to do with the fact that grub *cannot* read some
  sectors of the underlying disks, but not due to disk corruption, but
  due to logical sector accounting/math. Since it's a hardware RAID, I
  understand that from Linux perspective, it is "seen" as a single
  device. And even from grub perspective, it's a single disk (called
  'hd0' in grub terminology). But maybe grub is doing some low-level
  queries to gather physical device information on the underlying disks,
  and when it calculates the sector math, it notices the "section" to be
  read is outside of the "available" area of the device, giving us this
  error. Some mentions of "BIOS restrictions" in [0] or [1] could be
  also considered, the BIOS or even Grub could be unable to deal with
  files outside some "range" in the disk, like for security reasons -
  although I doubt that, I'm more keen to the first theory.

  In both theories, it ends-up being a restriction in loading a file
  *depending* on its logical position in the disk. If that is true, it's
  a very awkward limitation. The following data was suggested to be
  collected by user, to understand the topology of the disk and the
  logical position (LBA) of the files:

  debugfs -R "stat /boot/vmlinuz-4.4.0-194-generic" /dev/sda2 > debugfs-vmlinuz194-b.out
  hdparm --fibmap /boot/vmlinuz-4.4.0-194-generic > hdparm-vmlinuz194-b.out

  debugfs -R "stat /vmlinuz-4.4.0-194-generic" /dev/sda2 > debugfs-vmlinuz194-r.out
  hdparm --fibmap /vmlinuz-4.4.0-194-generic > hdparm-vmlinuz194-r.out

  [0] https://askubuntu.com/q/867047
  [1] https://askubuntu.com/q/416418

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