A preupgrade adventure - F16 to F17

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2012-07-20 at 19:26 +0000, Martin Langhoff wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 6:55 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> > Um. I think you might be working from a completely false premise. If you
> > did a fresh install of Fedora 16 you should have grub2. Not grub.
> 
> Hmmm. This laptop has had F14, but IIRC it got a wipe-and-reinstall
> treatment. You may be right on that point...
> 
> > The
> > way grubby works, if you have a grub2-based system it'll 'complain'
> > about the lack of a grub1 config file sometimes, but this isn't a
> > problem in itself and can be ignored; if something's going wrong, that
> > isn't the reason why. The file that needs to be updated
> > is /boot/grub2/grub.cfg (/etc/grub2.cfg is a symlink to it).
> 
> /boot/grub2 exists, but is empty.
> 
> So preupgrade / grubby don't work with grub, and should bail out if
> grub is the bootloader? Should that be my bug report?
> 
> > Note that once you reach the point of bootloader configuration,
> > preupgrade did its job long ago. You're now just using plain anaconda.
> 
> Preupgrade is driving, at least in the "prep" stage, so I'll file
> those bugs against preupgrade. Up to preupgrade maintainers to know
> more about who to blame ;-)

All preupgrade really does is download a bunch of packages and an
anaconda image, set the packages up as a repository, write a kickstart
file and create a bootloader entry to boot the anaconda image with the
kickstart file. The kickstart tells anaconda to run an upgrade using the
repository of packages.

As far as bootloader config goes, here is absolutely all that preupgrade
does:

bootloader --upgrade --location=none

it writes that line into the kickstart file (in your case; it can write
different lines depending on circumstances). That's *all* it does. That
tells anaconda to update the existing bootloader config. It's all on
anaconda and grubby after that. If you're hitting an actual bug here, I
would nominate grubby as the most likely culprit.

I don't think I'd call the bug 'it doesn't work with grub1 and should
bail out if it finds it'. Really, anaconda/grubby still ought to be
capable of updating grub1 configs, though I doubt this ever got tested.
If it's broken, I'd say the bug is just that it's broken, not that it
should be prohibited. (Though devs may say otherwise).

> > However, due to a bit of an oversight, a preupgrade-based upgrade uses a
> 
> TBH, I think that BZ#813973 is a high value bug that affects all
> "small boot partition" users, it should be fixed, or at least then
> known workaround noted in the wikipage.

Yeah, we do need to get it on the wiki. I do wish it would get fixed,
but we're waiting on preupgrade maintainers for that :/ I'll try and
throw it on commonbugs today.

> > I'm really a bit confused by exactly what bootloader you actually have
> 
> Plain grub. I apologize, this may be a F14->F16 box. Cannot check
> right now, it is finally upgrading...
> 
> If old grub is no longer the cool thing, I'll try to replace it with
> grub2 once my upgrade is complete.

In practice, yeah, just getting it onto grub2 - either before the
preupgrade or after - is likely the simplest way out of your problem. To
a rough approximation, we pretty much expect F16+ systems to be using
grub2.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net