On Thu, Dec 31, 2020 at 8:12 AM Peter Boy <pboy(a)uni-bremen.de> wrote:
I am doing some test installations to contribute some of our internal documentation for
Fedora Server documentation. Thereby a problem with the BiOSboot partition occurred
again.
To set up the system with RAID 1, manual partitioning must be performed during
installation. I have created in the Anaconda GUI:
- BIOSboot Partition
- /boot as default partition and changed to raid 1
- /ROOT as LVM changed to raid 1 as well (and some additional LVs in that VG)
The installation aborted with the error message:
"The following error occurred while installing the boot loader. The system will not
be bootable. Do you want to ignore this and continue with the installation?
Boot loader install failed"
Anaconda creates BIOSboot only on the first hard disk, but then tries to install grub
also on the 2nd hard disk and fails because of the missing BIOSboot partition there.
This was already discussed a long time ago and considered to create a BIOSboot partition
automatically when creating a GPT even without user action. However, concerns were raised
about this and the proposal was obviously not implemented.
I have not found a way in the current Anaconda manual partition GUI to install BIOSboot
on the 2nd disk as well. My simple workaround was to boot a live system, set up GPT and
BIOSboot, shutdown, and then boot the Fedora Server installation image.
The installation then went without a fuss. But is this the intended way? I suspect it
isn’t. I probably missed something.
I tried both 2-disk Automatic, and 2-disk Custom-Automatic
(Custom/manual partitioning, but click the blue text to create
partitions automatically). They both succeed but only one disk has
BIOS Boot
As I fiddle with Custom UI, manually creating BIOS boot, the
Device(s)>Modify dialog claims this partition is on both devices. But
the installation summary only shows it on one. And the installation
succeeds without failing.
storage.log shows the command: grub2-install --no-floppy /dev/vda
While /dev/vdb exists, it is not specified here. Now, there is a
separate dialog for bootloaders accessed in the Installation
Destination panel at the bottom, there's some blue text "full disk
summary and bootloader" which is just another way to get into trouble,
but is layered upon anything the user chooses in Custom that relates
to bootloader stuff.
I'd characterize this primarily as a bug. But the most central problem
is that esoteric bootloader related things should not exist in a GUI
installer. The installer should just do the right thing and present no
options at all whatsoever to the user. I'd go so far as to say this
should apply to $BOOT as well. All such things could be controlled by
kickstart, I leave that question up to the Anaconda and bootloader
teams. But their single design and recommendation for each use case
they want to support should not be user overridable in the GUI. Hands
down. It's currently a giant sand trap.
--
Chris Murphy