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Re: GRUB and HVM on EC2



On 9 July 2014 21:09, Tomasz Rybak <tomasz.rybak@post.pl> wrote:
Hello everyone.
I've been trying to understand what is going on when we try
to build HVM Wheezy image using GRUB 1.99 on GRUB 1.99.

The host is run from /dev/xvda (PVM with pvgrub).
It contains following entries in /boot/grub/device.map
(hd0) /dev/xvda
(hd1) /dev/xvdf
IMO it is left-over from creation of AMI; xvda is from
host, xvdf is from AMI - and now what was xvdf during AMI
creation is xvda when this AMI is run.

Target (chroot) contains following entries in device.map
(hd0) /dev/xvdf
(hd0,msdos1) /dev/mapper/xvdf1
This might be the first source of problems; when I run
grub-install with --recheck, it created device.map
like in the first case (in host).

/dev/mapper/xvdf1 points to /dev/dm-0. It points
to it from the very beginning, it is set by kpartx -as
Neither link_fn() nor unlink_fn() from common.tasks.boot.InstallGrub
are called.
Similarly, neither _before_link_dm_node nor _before_unlink_dm_node
from base.fs.volume.Volume are called.

/etc/fstab on target contains UUID, not /dev/mapper/xvdf1
for root partition. I've tried changing that, but it did not help.

>From my point of view, this is rather messy.
 * we have target / mounted to /dev/mapper/xvdf1, while
there exists /dev/xvdf1.
 * /etc/fstab uses UUID
 * grub-install is called with /dev/xvdf
 * but later grub puts UUIDs into grub.cfg in root=*

OTOH setting DISABLE_LINUX_UUID in grub configuration does not change
anything.

I've found GRUB bug related to UUIDs but I am not sure whether
it is related to our case or not:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=741342

I also tried fix proposed in
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=544577#10
but it didn't help.

Currently I feel lost with all of this.

Maybe time will help - it looks like GRUB from Jessie does
not have those problems ;-). OTOH now Debian stable cannot be run
on the new cheep (or free) machines like t2 which use HVM.

Best regards.

--
Tomasz Rybak  GPG/PGP key ID: 2AD5 9860
Fingerprint A481 824E 7DD3 9C0E C40A  488E C654 FB33 2AD5 9860
http://member.acm.org/~tomaszrybak


Nice job analyzing Tomasz. I am glad I'm not the only one looking at this, I thought I was going completely insane and that there had to be something simple I missed. It seems like that is not the case.
I completely agree with you regarding the mix and matching of UUIDs and devpaths, it should be cleaned up at some point. And I feel that work would become easier once there is an automated way of building, booting and testing.

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