Dear Maintainer,


I can't seem to get extlinux to boot from an xfs formated partition.
I've built myself a little script to create a clean image (attached).
It works just fine if I use `mkfs.ext4` or `mkfs.btrfs` (i.e. it greets
me with a "boot:" prompt).  However, if I use `mkfs.xfs` I only get
"Missing OS".


The results stay the same when using a DOS partition table (and
mbr.bin) instead.  Only the error message when trying to boot from xfs
is slightly different:

  Failed to load ldlinux.c32
  Boot failed: please change disks and press a key to continue.


The version in jessie is also affected by this problem.


Thank you
Lukas Schwaighofer

As of June 2017 still not possible to boot from XFS.

Maybe Syslinux 6.04 Changelog http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php?title=Syslinux_6_Changelog :

"XFS: Support XFS on-disk V5, node directories version 3, xfsprogs 4.x. (Paulo Alcantara)."

Hi Marek,

I've recently taken over maintenance of syslinux/exlinux as part of
the Debian CD Group, so I it's time to have a look at my own bug report.
Thanks for providing the link to the upstream changelog :) .

I've just compiled the most recent version of syslinux from git.  It
turns out that even this version can only boot from XFS partitions if
an MBR partition scheme is used.  With a GPT partition scheme, booting
is still not possible (same error as above).  I only then noticed that,
according to the wiki [1], syslinux only supports booting from XFS in
MBR partition schemes:

    As of Syslinux 6.03, an XFS partition in an "MBR" partition scheme
    is supported.

I've cloned the bug to track the MBR [2] and GPT [3] problems
separately.  I should be able to close the XFS+MBR problem eventually.
Since XFS+GPT is not yet supported upstream and it doesn't look like
anyone is actively working on that at the moment, I doubt that can be
fixed anytime soon.

Regards
Lukas

[1] http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php?title=Filesystem#XFS
[2] https://bugs.debian.org/803938
[3] https://bugs.debian.org/879543