#2665 PR merged: On POWER require bootlist & ofpathname if needed

Labels: bug, fixed / solved / done

pcahyna opened issue at 2021-08-03 16:40:

Pull Request Details:

  • Type: Bug Fix

  • Impact: High

  • Reference to related issue (URL): https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1983008 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1983000

  • How was this pull request tested?

    • Run rear mkrescue in a KVM virtual machine on RHEL 8 without powerpc-utils-core (which contains those two utilities) and checked that it immediately aborts with ERROR: Cannot find required programs: ofpathname. With powerpc-utils-core installed and /usr/sbin/bootlist manually removed it succeeds and the initrd contains ofpathname. With powerpc-utils-core installed normally it succeeds and the initrd contains both ofpathname and bootlist.
    • Run rear mkrescue in a PowerVM LPAR on RHEL 8 without powerpc-utils-core (which contains those two utilities) and checked that it immediately aborts with ERROR: Cannot find required programs: ofpathname bootlist. With powerpc-utils-core installed it succeeds and the initrd contains both ofpathname and bootlist.
    • Run rear mkrescue on a PowerNV server (bare metal) on RHEL 8 without powerpc-utils-core, it completes fine. Verified that if powerpc-utils-core is installed, the initrd contains both ofpathname and bootlist.

  • Brief description of the changes in this pull request:

As reported by @rmetrich, the ofpathname binary is called by grub2-install. Therefore, it is required in the rescue system in order to make the recovered system bootable, except for the PowerNV (Not Virtualized - bare metal) case. Under PowerVM, we also need the bootlist executable to make the system bootable.

Add those two binaries to REQUIRED_PROGS instead of PROGS under the appropriate conditions.

Do not handle PowerNV for ppc64: according to 89ddb9fc17adb022ce9c10be0c3e5b835ba139d7, only ppc64le Linux can run in PowerNV.

(Wouldn't it be simpler though to symlink Linux-ppc64.conf to Linux-ppc64le.conf? Their differences seem to be minimal.)

pcahyna commented at 2021-08-04 08:18:

@rmetrich can you please review?

jsmeix commented at 2021-08-04 11:59:

Only as a side note:
On my openSUSE Leap 15.2 x86_64 system
I have grub2-2.04 but I neither have ofpathname nor bootlist
so this issue seems to be strictly POWER specific.

jsmeix commented at 2021-08-04 12:05:

@rmetrich @pcahyna
I have a general question:
When GRUB2 is used as bootloader on a machine
and grub2-install requires certain helper programs
I wonder how GRUB2 could have ever been installed as bootloader
on the original system without having its helper programs available?
I.e. I wonder how with PROGS+=( bootlist ofpathname )
it could ever happen that bootlist and/or ofpathname
are not available on the system?

jsmeix commented at 2021-08-04 12:05:

@rmetrich
I assigned it to you so that you could merge it as you like.

pcahyna commented at 2021-08-04 12:12:

I wonder how GRUB2 could have ever been installed as bootloader
on the original system without having its helper programs available?
I.e. I wonder how with PROGS+=( bootlist ofpathname )
it could ever happen that bootlist and/or ofpathname
are not available on the system?

@rmetrich how did it happen that the system ended up in this state? But I suppose that in general GRUB is installed by the installer, which might have a different set of toools available than the installed system. Also, the package might be removed by the user after installation, because the GRUB packages do not declare a dependency on it (that might be considered a bug in GRUB packaging).

pcahyna commented at 2021-08-19 12:08:

@rmetrich can the PR be merged, please?

[Export of Github issue for rear/rear.]