Bug#777647: partman-efi always complains when installing from usb

[Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com>]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 11:39:00AM -0500, Phillip Susi wrote:
>On 2/11/2015 4:38 AM, Steve McIntyre wrote:
>
>> This suggests the problem is Ubuntu-specific, or there's an issue with
>> other software. You allude to potential changes in libparted; how do
>> the versions in Debian and Ubuntu compare here?
>
>They are in sync.  The change in particular that I think may be related
>is that in parted3, it now keeps the partition table cached between
>commands rather than re-reading it every time.  This has the affect that
>when you create a partition and tell parted it will hold an ext2
>filesystem, and then print the table, it now reports that it contains an
>ext2 filesystem since it is no longer re-reading the disk and finding
>the partition to be empty.

That caching worries me, I'll be honest...

>Now that I think about it though, this change was in parted proper and
>so should not affect other libparted clients like parted_server, so that
>seems to have been a red herring.
>
>The thing I saw that struck me as similar to that parted change was that
>when I put a set +x in the partman-efi script, it appeared to have
>identified an ext2 filesystem on the disk that partman was formatting
>with the usual default ext4 root and swap partitions so I kind of
>assumed it simply had not gotten around to running mke2fs yet but had
>asked libparted to make an ext2 partition and then partman-efi
>identified it as a non efi system partition.
>
>This script really should be running before the disk has been modified
>in any way though right?  So it should still just see a blank disk or a
>disk with no partitions and not count it as a non ESP. 

Quite, that's exactly how it's meant to work and it's what I've seen
in my development and testing. Silly question - is ubiquity trying to
run some of the d-i bits in parallel, or something?

>Hrm... I'll do some more debugging tonight.

Cool.

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                steve@einval.com
There's no sensation to compare with this
Suspended animation, A state of bliss