UEFI testing of F19 Alpha RC2 requested

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Wed Apr 10 17:08:31 UTC 2013


Hi, folks. This is a special testing request for F19 Alpha.

There are known to be a couple of bugs that can cause UEFI installation 
to fail because there isn't enough space in the firmware NVRAM; as a fix 
for that somewhat-infamous bricking bug on some laptops, the current F19 
kernel refuses to write to the NVRAM if it's 50% or more full. As Josh 
put it:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=947142

"The kernel now limits efivars from using more than 50% of the available 
firmware space.  This has some known deficiencies if the firmware on the 
machine doesn't do garbage collection to free up space.  This is being 
worked on upstream."

Unfortunately we really don't know how many systems are likely to have 
problems with this mechanism, and so we're finding it hard to decide if 
we need to block the Alpha on the kernel improvements. So we're asking 
that anyone who has a machine with a UEFI firmware on which they can 
safely do a disposable test install - to a spare disk or partition or 
whatever - try and do a *native UEFI* install of F19 Alpha RC2 (if 
writing to a USB stick with livecd-iso-to-disk, remember to pass --efi 
to make a UEFI bootable stick):

https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/19-Alpha-RC2/

and see if you get a successful install. Bear in mind that there are 
obviously other bugs you might run into as this is an Alpha build - if 
you run into anything else by all means report it separately, but what 
we're principally interested in is, if you make it to bootloader 
installation (one of the last things done in the install process), does 
it succeed, or do you get an error? And if it succeeds, does the 
installed system boot - at least as far as grub?

If as many people as possible could test and send their feedback to this 
thread or as a comment on the bug report, that'd be great. Thanks!
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net


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