Arch Linux

afree10

Member

Registered: 2013-05-23

Posts: 17

[SOLVED] [was no corruption] potential FILE CORRUPTION with VIM

if I
vim /boot/syslinux/syslinux.cfg
then
OPTIONALLY make desired changes to file
:wq!
it will prevent the system from booting on next reboot

I had to fix up my syslinux.cfg by deleting/renaming syslinux.cfg pacman -S syslinux and editing the syslinux.cfg file with vi

Last edited by afree10 (2016-11-17 16:15:42)

afree10

Member

Registered: 2013-05-23

Posts: 17

Re: [SOLVED] [was no corruption] potential FILE CORRUPTION with VIM

Strange thing is cmp -l of a non "vimed" syslinux.cfg and a "vimed" one shows nothing, implying that the files have the same contents.

Last edited by afree10 (2016-11-14 04:39:49)

afree10

Member

Registered: 2013-05-23

Posts: 17

Re: [SOLVED] [was no corruption] potential FILE CORRUPTION with VIM

I even moved the "vimed" file to a FAT32 USB and back (to check if some ext4 thing was somehow being modified by vim to result in some crazyness) and the syslinux is still unbootable with the file. I can tell that the file is at least detected by syslinux upon boot since it gives a different error message compared to no syslinux.cfg being present.

Last edited by afree10 (2016-11-14 04:58:32)

jasonwryan

Anarchist

From: .nz

Registered: 2009-05-09

Posts: 30,426

Website

Re: [SOLVED] [was no corruption] potential FILE CORRUPTION with VIM

There is no need to bump your thread, use the edit button.

Are you editing the file as root? What are the permissions before and after editing?

---

Arch + dwm   •   Mercurial repos  •   Surfraw

Registered Linux User #482438

afree10

Member

Registered: 2013-05-23

Posts: 17

Re: [SOLVED] [was no corruption] potential FILE CORRUPTION with VIM

Permissions are the same before and after and I am editing the file as root.
Edit: Also it seems moving the "vimed" file to the FAT32 USB and back actually fixes the breakage. So I don't know what happened before.
Edit 2: Even lsattr attributes are the same.
In the stat output only filename, access/modify/change times and inode are different.
Edit 3: Doesn't seem like this bug is mentioned in later versions of vim or on the vim git bugtracker thing. Also dosen't seem its caused by any vim configuration specific to Arch Linux (except perhaps compile options, but I don't see how they would be doing anything).
Edit 4: Happens in Linux Kernel 4.4 (10 Months Old) to 4.9-rc5 (several hours old). So probably either a vim or syslinux issue.
Edit 5: Happens with vim 6 (2001) to latest vim git. And default arch linux vim. I also forgot to mention this bug happens on the default arch linux kernel.

Last edited by afree10 (2016-11-14 12:47:19)

afree10

Member

Registered: 2013-05-23

Posts: 17

Re: [SOLVED] [was no corruption] potential FILE CORRUPTION with VIM

Encounted another issue with syslinux that seemed to be due to 64bit support being suddenly switched on. By the time I had overcome that issue this issue was no longer occuring with either latest git syslinux or arch linuxes syslinux. Very strange indeed.