Bug#932416: debian-installer: running d-i in parallel on multiple consoles may lead to race conditions
Package: debian-installer
Severity: normal
Dear Maintainer,
I have observed some failures when running debian-installer in a
paravirtualized Xen environment, but I do not believe that this issue
is necessarily limited to paravirtualized Xen.
When running the installer with a preseed file, installation fails
at random points during the process. For instance, I have seen it
fail as soon as the "choose language" step. Or it may fail when
downloading installer components. In some instances, the file
/var/lib/dpkg/info/lilo-installer.isinstallable goes missing, and the line
"d-i lilo-installer/skip boolean true"
from my preseed file is ignored.
When manually running the installer, the program has been known to
fail at the first step, "choose language".
I spent some time tracking down the problem, and I believe it is
caused by race conditions due to running multiple copies of the installer
in parallel. My Xen domU is booted with the kernel command line
"console=hvc0", and /proc/consoles has two entries: hvc0 and tty0.
I have not seen the issues described above on a system that only has one
entry in /proc/consoles. For instance, a Xen domU using HVM
virtualization and booted with the kernel command line "console=ttyS0"
only has a single entry in /proc/consoles.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 10.0
APT prefers stable
APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 4.19.0-5-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
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