Disable systemd-boot on live media #5172

jlinton · 2023-09-14T03:25:57Z

This fixes https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2237327, by adding the btrfs subvolumes like zipl and extlinux to the systemd-boot strings. Grub has special cased this in grub-tools, otherwise a better fix would have been to get the btrfs subvolume boot string into boot_args when BTRFS was selected rather than depending on each bootloader to discover and fix them up.

It also partially fixes https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2234638 by providing a nicer message on live installs. This fix isn't ideal because 1: The webui apparently doesn't have a way to actually display storage/bootloader errors like the old anaconda UI does. 2: Its a bit later in the installation than I would have liked, but moving it earlier tends to blow up the webUI in even less ideal ways.

Suggestions are welcome...

M4rtinK · 2023-09-14T11:09:26Z

/kickstart-test --testtype smoke

jkonecny12 · 2023-09-18T10:54:38Z

@jlinton thanks for the proposed fixes.

@KKoukiou I wonder, do you think that we can do something about the storage error propagation in web UI?

KKoukiou · 2023-09-18T10:56:52Z

@jlinton thanks for the proposed fixes.

@KKoukiou I wonder, do you think that we can do something about the storage error propagation in web UI?

Where exactly these errors you talk about here come from?

VladimirSlavik

First commit is OK.

Second commit needs more discussion, I think. There's a bit of a problem, in that sdboot can be selected on live by using kickstart... Which is not a thing that would be really supported in the future. So, perhaps it's actually ok, because the whole scheme will need to be revisited anyway.

Generally speaking, the error should be happening at different time of the installation process. We know we're on live and what the "inputs" are, so we don't have to wait until installation time. We can act on the problem as soon as we have the data, either on setting the default bootloader from conf, or when processing the kickstart.

However, I think this might be actually good enough. Check my logic please?

The options here are:

Selected via kickstart on live = unsupported = hard error too late is somewhat admissible in unsupported state
Selected via config file on live = supported, BUT conf and media type is known in advance, so the media author knows they are creating an impossible combination = hard error late is sort-of ok too, this should come up when testing the media before circulation
If sdboot starts being supported on live, the error is no longer happening, so does not matter.

pyanaconda/modules/storage/bootloader/installation.py

VladimirSlavik · 2023-09-18T11:34:53Z

Where exactly these errors you talk about here come from?

These would manifest as D-Bus errors that bubble up from there via InstallBootloaderWithTasks or GenerateInitramfsWithTasks, which are hardwired into the installation queue. In other words, this, as written now, would stop the installation by erroring it out.

BTW, there was originally some discussion about "known errors" and "unknown errors". This sounds like a known error, but does not behave like one - it's raised at install time, even if it's known in advance. I'm not too sure if there is an existing better place to plug this, though...

VladimirSlavik · 2023-09-18T11:53:13Z

One more thought is that we might want to fall back to grub instead. But I'm not sure if it does any good. Personally I'm ignorant of situations where sdboot would be desired, unsupported, and selected, unless the user is a hardcore tester / power user and intentionally chooses to do this. But in such case, the experience does not have to be polished at cost of additional code complexity.

VladimirSlavik · 2023-09-18T11:58:47Z

@poncovka I'd appreciate any thoughts about

the validity of my reasoning
if you have an idea where to plug the error earlier
if it's a valid action to have a fallback for bootloader choice

poncovka · 2023-09-18T12:23:14Z

The webui apparently doesn't have a way to actually display storage/bootloader errors like the old anaconda UI does.

@jlinton Do you have a screenshot of the error in the old UI? There are multiple error handlers and I am not sure which one you mean. Or if you could just point us at the place in the code where you tried to raise the error.

poncovka · 2023-09-18T13:30:48Z

Some background. This is not exactly about support, but about missing installation dependencies of the selected bootloader. While are able to verify these kind of dependencies for RPM installations, we never had time to implement support for other types of payloads like live images and rpm ostree. Btw, these checks are also done during the installation process, so I wouldn't worry about that too much.

jlinton · 2023-09-18T16:15:51Z

One more thought is that we might want to fall back to grub instead. But I'm not sure if it does any good. Personally I'm ignorant of situations where sdboot would be desired, unsupported, and selected, unless the user is a hardcore tester / power user and intentionally chooses to do this. But in such case, the experience does not have to be polished at cost of additional code complexity.

IMHO, its better to simply stop the install if inst.sdboot/etc is selected against a live image that already has grub rather than (silently?) falling back to grub. That way the user isn't surprised when the machine boots with grub.

jlinton · 2023-09-18T19:23:21Z

The webui apparently doesn't have a way to actually display storage/bootloader errors like the old anaconda UI does.

@jlinton Do you have a screenshot of the error in the old UI? There are multiple error handlers and I am not sure which one you mean. Or if you could just point us at the place in the code where you tried to raise the error.

Screen shot of what the above change looks like with the graphical UI.

Or where I was trying to handle the error before the current PR? I tried a couple of places, one of the nicer ones was just in the init routine of SystemdBoot() that one IIRC just reset the webUI into an infinite loop.

rvykydal · 2023-09-19T10:55:30Z

@jlinton thanks for the proposed fixes.
@KKoukiou I wonder, do you think that we can do something about the storage error propagation in web UI?

Where exactly these errors you talk about here come from?

I think that at this point we should try solve this issue wrt to GUI and then later (at a separte issue) look at how the solution works with WebUI and think if/how we should handle this and similar cases. I've got a feeling that including WebUI into considerations now could make resolution of the issue too complicated.

jlinton · 2023-09-20T00:56:06Z

Well, AFAIK its only really an issue on the live media (webUI) and OStree, which needs another fix. I would like to get the btrfs fix in place because that will allow everything media to work out of the box, rather than requiring an alternate FS, or user interaction during the boot?

Should I split these to commits so the first one can land sooner?

poncovka · 2023-09-20T08:19:03Z

Should I split these to commits so the first one can land sooner?

Yeah, that sounds like a good idea :-)

jlinton · 2023-09-20T19:49:15Z

Moved systemd/btrfs commit to #5194 and rebased.

jlinton · 2023-09-20T22:27:16Z

Uh, this isn't any better with the latest f39 builds, I rebased to those and it fires too early too, and doesn't get caught properly.

jlinton · 2023-09-20T22:55:28Z

Ok, so I moved into an overridden is_valid_stage1_device() and that sorta works, but is ugly too. The storage config gets an error, so if you go into the storage config, and click the not obvious link to see what the error is, it give a couple pages of the error message about systemd-boot not being supported on live media.

pep8speaks · 2023-09-20T23:59:21Z

Hello @jlinton! Thanks for updating this PR. We checked the lines you've touched for PEP 8 issues, and found:

There are currently no PEP 8 issues detected in this Pull Request. Cheers! 🍻

Comment last updated at 2023-09-21 00:01:14 UTC

Live images are already installed with grub2 and cannot be changed on the fly to systemd-boot (well at least without a lot of extra work). In case the user passed one of the systemd-boot options to anaconda, we should be a bit more graceful than failing to run the updateloader entries script as currently happens. This change, when run on non webUI installs results in a popup notifying the user there is an error in the bootloader configuration and asking if they would like to ignore it. Resolves: 2234638 Signed-off-by: Jeremy Linton <jeremy.linton@arm.com>

jlinton · 2023-09-21T00:10:23Z

Ok, I'm pretty happy with this one. Its one of the "infinite loop" ones with the webUI, because the user gets stuck in the storage configuration clicking next without any notification of what is wrong.

OTOH: In f39, which i'm assuming is the immediate target it looks like:

followed by:

jlinton · 2023-09-21T00:11:48Z

Also, should I create a separate PR for the f39 branch (once this is merged), or can you guys merge this commit to both branches?

KKoukiou

Since master now is defaulting to the new Web UI (see new Fedora rawhide anaconda UI) this needs to be re-tested on the new UI.

I will try if I can test this.

jkonecny12 · 2023-09-27T12:42:56Z

pyanaconda/modules/storage/bootloader/systemd.py

+
+    def is_valid_stage1_device(self, device, early=False):
+        valid = True
+        if conf.system.provides_liveuser:


Hi, we should probably make the special casing include also ostree based installations. However, I fear the logic needs to change a bit more thanks to that.

Maybe it's more correct then to check the payload type? If the payload type is DNF then all good, otherwise error out.

KKoukiou · 2023-09-27T13:43:12Z

/build-image --live --webui

github-actions · 2023-09-27T13:51:09Z

Images built based on commit 8626d88:

Live: failure

Download the images from the bottom of the job status page.

jlinton · 2023-10-09T02:52:26Z

I'm frankly having second thoughts about disabling this. I've been building systemd-boot live media (in various states of functionality but its getting closer AFAIK).

So, really it doesn't look like a huge lift to create live systemd-boot media. But it does require dedicated images (rather than a single ex workstation image that can flip between bootloaders). Right now I have a fedora-live-systemd.ks that builds live media with systemd-boot where the intention is to install that to to the end machine with systemd-boot.

Meaning, if/when that gets cleaned up this code should be detecting whether the final media is a systemd-boot or grub before making the decision to complain about it. And I expect its going to be a similar situation for ostree too.

jlinton · 2023-10-26T02:33:26Z

I'm thinking about, but haven't yet managed to test, the idea that instead of aborting on live media installs/etc it only aborts if it is running from the live media and it can't find updateloaderentries, although maybe a better plan is actually to query something in systemd-boot itself, but i'm not yet sure what a good "is this image systemd-boot" flag is, short of actually checking to see if it exists in the ESP.

poncovka · 2023-11-02T17:40:54Z

@jlinton I have opened a new pull request with an alternative solution. The team would like to get it to Fedora 39 soon. Can you look at it, please? The idea is to support only payloads where we are able to verify the systemd-boot requirements. At this moment, that's only the package installation. The check can be eventually extended to support other types of payloads. #5297

VladimirSlavik · 2023-12-04T15:09:50Z

@poncovka as the alternative is merged, should this be closed?

jlinton · 2023-12-04T18:44:03Z

Why not, i'm closing it.

github-actions bot added the f40 label Sep 14, 2023

jkonecny12 added port to Fedora and removed port to Fedora labels Sep 18, 2023

VladimirSlavik reviewed Sep 18, 2023

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pyanaconda/modules/storage/bootloader/installation.py Outdated Show resolved Hide resolved

jlinton force-pushed the systemd_disable_live_fix_btrfs branch from 07e49a1 to 3874ce5 Compare September 18, 2023 19:56

jlinton mentioned this pull request Sep 20, 2023

storage: Handle BTRFS with systemd-boot #5194

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jlinton force-pushed the systemd_disable_live_fix_btrfs branch from 3874ce5 to 7a0e5cb Compare September 20, 2023 19:45

jlinton changed the title ~~Disable systemd-boot on live media and fix btrfs boot options~~ Disable systemd-boot on live media Sep 20, 2023

jlinton force-pushed the systemd_disable_live_fix_btrfs branch from 7a0e5cb to 0f79309 Compare September 20, 2023 23:59

jlinton force-pushed the systemd_disable_live_fix_btrfs branch from 0f79309 to 8626d88 Compare September 21, 2023 00:01

KKoukiou reviewed Sep 27, 2023

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jkonecny12 reviewed Sep 27, 2023

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KKoukiou approved these changes Nov 2, 2023

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poncovka mentioned this pull request Nov 2, 2023

storage: Allow systemd-boot only for package installations #5297

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jlinton closed this Dec 4, 2023

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Disable systemd-boot on live media #5172

Disable systemd-boot on live media #5172

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