Bug#795490: console-setup-udeb: race condition in keyboard detection
Package: console-setup-udeb
Version: 1.123
With current Jessie, when preseeding Country/Language/Locale but (intentionally) *not* keymap, d-i's first interaction
with the user should be to ask for a keymap selection. However, in this situation, since there was no earlier "pause"
(from user interaction), the script console-setup-udeb.postinst is run very early, while buses (like USB) are still
being scanned.
As a result, there is a race condition: depending on the hardware, /sys/bus/usb/devices/*:* is (resp. is not) fully
populated at the time the function "keyboard_present" is called. I have both of these kinds of hardware, an USB
keyboard, and just spent 2 days figuring out the difference:
- when it is, the keyboard is detected, and the user is then asked to select a keymap as intended;
- when it is not, no keyboard is detected, and the preseeded install proceeds with the default (US), and the install
proceeds all the way to the end ... with a wrong keymap (and associated reduced list of install locales).
A very quick workaround is to insert a "sleep 5" at the beginning of console-setup-udeb.postinst .
But I assume package maintainers could do better, explicitly syncing with the end of the bus scanning operation.
This might look like a corner case, but I can imagine anybody in the business of bootable stick remastering / preseed
might be randomly hit, and at least letting people know about the mechanism could save man-years of useless sweat.
Best,
-Alex
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