Incompatible Filesystem Settings on Host vs. Image

Note

Abstract

This page provides further information how to solve image boot problems if the filesystem tool chain on the image build host is incompatible with the image target distribution

When KIWI NG builds an image which requests the creation of a filesystem, the required filesystem creation tool, for example mkfs.xfs, is called from the host on which KIWI NG gets called. It is expected that the generated filesystem is compatible with the image target distribution. This expectation is not always correct and depends on the compatibility of the filesystem default settings between build host and image target. We know about the following settings that causes an incompatible filesystem which will not be able to be used on boot:

Ext[2,3,4]

Check /etc/mke2fs.conf on the build host and make sure the configured inode_size is the same as the setting used for the target image. To solve an issue of this type use the following filesystem creation option in your KIWI NG image configuration:

<type fscreateoptions="-I inode-size"/>

XFS

Check the XFS metadata setup on the build host and make sure the settings are compatible with the target image. XFS has the default settings compiled in, thus it might be needed to build the image first and use the xfs_info tool in a disk.sh script to fetch the settings at build time of the image. We know from community reports that the setting sparse=1 will cause issues on older versions of grub’s xfs module, which does not know how to handle this setting properly. To solve an issue of this type use the following filesystem creation option in your KIWI NG image configuration:

<type fscreateoptions="-i sparse=0"/>

Note

There can be more inconsistencies in the area of filesystems which we haven’t listed here. In general it’s advisable to build the image in a compatible environment. At best the build host distribution is of the same major Linux version than the image target. For this purpose KIWI NG provides the so called boxed-plugin. Further details can be found in Building in a Self-Contained Environment