directory extents
The directory extent list does not have to be a continuous list of data
blocks. When GRUB tries to read a non-existant member of the list,
grub_xfs_read_file() will return a block of zero'ed memory. Checking for
a zero'ed magic number is sufficient to skip this non-existant data block.
Prior to commit 07318ee7e (fs/xfs: Fix XFS directory extent parsing)
this was handled as a subtle side effect of reading the (non-existant)
tail data structure. Since the block was zero'ed the computation of the
number of directory entries in the block would return 0 as well.
directory extents
The directory extent list does not have to be a continuous list of data
blocks. When GRUB tries to read a non-existant member of the list,
grub_xfs_read_file() will return a block of zero'ed memory. Checking for
a zero'ed magic number is sufficient to skip this non-existant data block.