Bug#987788: debian-installer: qemu-system-s390x installation fails due to segfault in main-menu

[Valentin Vidic <vvidic@debian.org>]

On Mon, May 03, 2021 at 06:38:05PM +0200, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> How did you start it? I couldn't manage to make it start (with qemu from
> unstable or from stable), I only got the kernel start and a couple of
> lines. I was taking
> 
> http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/dists/bullseye/main/installer-s390x/current/images/generic/initrd.debian
> http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/dists/bullseye/main/installer-s390x/current/images/generic/kernel.debian
> 
> and run 
> 
> qemu-system-s390x -kernel /tmp/s390x/kernel.debian -initrd /tmp/s390x/initrd.debian -m 1G -serial stdio
> 
> and got
> 
> [..kernel logs..]
> [    4.349417] Run /init as init process
> [    5.499051] failover: module verification failed: signature and/or required key missing - tainting kernel
> [    6.530501] virtio_net virtio0 enc0: renamed from eth0
> steal-ctty: No such file or directory
> [   83.282353] random: crng init done
> 
> and nothing more.

Hi, I start it with:

virt-install --arch=s390x --name test --memory 1024 --disk size=3 -l http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/dists/bullseye/main/installer-s390x/ --extra-args='BOOT_DEBUG=3'

but it should be more or less the same thing as your command. The problem
is you are hitting steal-ctty bug from #961056. I use BOOT_DEBUG=3 to
get a shell before the installer starts and edit /sbin/reopen-console
with this fix:

https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/rootskel/-/merge_requests/2/diffs

After that installer should start and sometimes (but not always) fail in
the first step (configuring network interfaces). The problem is I don't
have a shell after that segfault to get more info from the logs or dmesg.

-- 
Valentin