On Sat, 2011-11-05 at 17:04 +0000, mike cloaked wrote: > On Sat, Nov 5, 2011 at 5:22 AM, Adam Williamson <awill...@redhat.com> wrote: > > > There are various 'hot topics' exposed during the F16 cycle that we'll > > likely expand the matrix to cover better in F17 - bootloader location > > issues, EFI issues, USB installer issues (when we first drew up the > > installation tests, using USB sticks for installation was very rare, and > > I think you couldn't actually write non-live images to USB at all), and > > Last night I used livecd-iso-to-disk to write the rc5 64 bit DVD > install iso to an 8 GiB usbkey - which I am planning to test this > evening to install to a desktop.... i.e. the usbkey will be my install > (source) medium. > > I have used this method for several years - and not had a failure yet > - I will report if there are any problems when I do this install for > f16....
Ah, that's far too simple. ;) See, the problem we solved in RC5 only came when you wrote the installer to USB with l-i-t-d *and then used it to upgrade an F15 system*. The problem was that anaconda doesn't filter out the USB key it's installing from as a potential bootloader installation target, and it orders the preferred bootloader target disks in the order they're presented by the BIOS - and when you boot from a USB stick, the BIOS presents it as the first disk. So when you run the traditional installer from a USB stick, the USB stick starts out as the preferred bootloader target disk. Why does this only affect upgrades, and why didn't we catch it before? Well, on fresh installs, you get the 'cleardiskssel' screen, which is the one where you put 'install target devices' on the right and 'data storage devices' (i.e. "leave these alone!") on the left, and pick one of the 'install target devices' to be the bootloader device with a radio button. On upgrades, you _don't_ get that screen. So on a fresh install it doesn't really matter which device anaconda would have chosen as the bootloader target, as in practice you get to make the decision anyway, and because of various other factors I won't go into here, that screen doesn't 'default' to anything - it doesn't default to nominating the USB stick as the bootloader target device. Why didn't we catch it before? Before F16, when you upgraded, the default action was not to actually write a new bootloader. The default action was just to update the existing bootloader *configuration file* in the Fedora installation being upgraded. Since this was almost always what you wanted to do, very few people switched to the 'install new bootloader' option when upgrading, which makes it much less likely we'd catch this bug. And _finally_, there is another dialog you _do_ see when you upgrade, which essentially is designed to let you choose whether to put the bootloader on the MBR or on the first partition of the target disk. It has a drop-down labelled 'BIOS boot order' which is intended to let you correct the ordering of the disks if anaconda somehow read it wrong - what it really does is change the (hd0), (hd1) etc etc order that the grub config file uses. But prior to F16, it would also change the target disk for the bootloader install - so if anaconda had decided the USB stick was the target disk, you could fiddle the BIOS boot order in that dropdown and use that to make it pick the hard disk instead. So there used to be a way to work around the problem. Put all that together, and you get an F16 blocker. But it's a hell of a lot of moving parts...and that's one of the problems anaconda team and QA face all the time. The pending F17 anaconda UI re-design isn't just intended to make anaconda look shinier and be more user-friendly; it's also intended to rethink a lot of these paths which have grown complex and messy over time and are just badly designed. You may have noticed in the above that there are two overlapping dialogs about bootloader location, and you might get one or the other or both or neither depending on what installation path you choose exactly, which is kind of silly. That's one of the things the UI rewrite will be able to improve, and hence make everyone's job easier, we hope... -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora http://www.happyassassin.net -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
