Anaconda-devel October 2014

anaconda-devel@lists.stg.fedoraproject.org

12 participants
8 discussions

gui versus kickstart capabilites
by Gene Czarcinski 30 Oct '14

30 Oct '14

IIRC, I read somewhere that functionality should be implemented first in kickstart and then in the gui. Thus, everything I can do in a kickstart install I should be able to do in a gui install. Correct? OK, now let me reverse that. I believe that everything (all functionality) I can do in a gui install I should be able to do in a kickstart install. Correct? Gene

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curious about /root/anaconda-ks.cfg
by Gene Czarcinski 28 Oct '14

28 Oct '14

I realize that the /root/anaconda-ks.cfg file left by anaconda after the install is only an approximate for what a real kickstart would be. For example, these is no way in a kickstart file to cause an existing btrfs subvolume to be deleted and then a new btrfs subvolume with the same name created. I was looking at the /root/anaconda-ks.cfg file left after a Live Lxde install of F21-Beta-rc1. The file contains the kickstart harddrive command. Shouldn't this be liveimg instead? Gene

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liveimg
by Gene Czarcinski 28 Oct '14

28 Oct '14

This may or may not be the right place to ask this. If it should be asked elsewhere, just point me. I have been experimenting with the kickstart liveimg command. My first test was to create a simple kickstart file on my LAN so that I could boot a netinstall with ks=http://... The kickstart file includes no repo definitions but does include: liveimg --url=http://... where I point to a squashfs.img file from Fedora-Live-LXDE-x86_64-21_Beta-1.iso This worked just as I wanted it to. However, it is not quite the way I would like to do things. Specifically, I would like to boot a Live CD/DVD/usb and be able to execute a kickstart which would have: liveimg --url=file:///LiveOS/squashfs.img The problem is the boot. Either it is looking for root= or it simply ignores and ks= and drops into live-install mode. Anyone give me a hint as to how I can get the boot to act more like the boot from netinstall? Gene

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RE: How to set up RHEL7 ks.cfg for both boot methods (UEFI + Legacy BIOS under UEFI)...
by Spike White 24 Oct '14

24 Oct '14

Chris, Yes, this is *exactly* what I'm wanting to do!! I'm crafting a std RHEL7 build for my company now. I've got the agnostic disk layout working -- under BIOS. It's a GPT-partitioned system disk. Under GPT, there's not sufficient space at the beginning of the disk to drop the entire BIOS boot loader. So it drops the initial boot loader. Then you have a 1 MB partition, where the stage 1.5 BIOS bootloader goes. Looks like this: [root@austl10geqldb04 ~]# gdisk -l /dev/sda ... Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name 1 2048 4095 1024.0 KiB EF02 <-- 1 MB partition for stage 1.5 bootloader 2 4096 618495 300.0 MiB 0700 <----- /boot ... 5 1170382848 1170995199 299.0 MiB EF00 EFI System <--- /boot/efi I'm ok if the bootloader build, location and helper scripts do the right thing for only the boot mode I've done. As long as in my %post section, I can drive them to lay down the bootloader + support files for the other method. Of course, I'd have to know the exact syntax for this. I'm guessing it'd be something like this: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/GRUB_2?rd=Grub2#Updating_GRUB_2_configuratio… Or it'd be tolerable if I write up instructions to the sysadmins, how to trivially lay down the loader + support files for the other boot method. Then flip to that method. (It'd be trivial because the disks are already laid out in this agnostic disk scheme). Eventually, I think UEFI will be the default boot method and BIOS will be just a distant memory. But for now manufacturers are still shipping new server model w/ BIOS as their default boot method. So we're not there yet. Spike PS Excellent link. Thanks!

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How to set up RHEL7 ks.cfg for both boot methods (UEFI + Legacy BIOS under UEFI)....
by Spike White 24 Oct '14

24 Oct '14

Anaconda developers, I wish to enhance our RHEL7 ks.cfg file to support either UEFI boot or legacy BIOS on UEFI boot. This build will be supported on recent server models only, whose system firmware supports both these boot methods. I have done both BIOS and UEFI kickstarts. (Fedora 20). My preference would be a single partitioning scheme for both. That is, I'd add inst.gpt to the boot flags. Like this: KERNEL /boot/ol/7.0/x86_64/vmlinuz APPEND initrd=/boot/ol/7.0/x86_64/initrd.img inst.stage2=hd:LABEL=MINIBOOT:/stage2/squashfs.img inst.ks=hd:LABEL=MINIBOOT:/ks.cfg inst.gpt ^^^^^^^^ And then I'd create a biosboot partition and a efi partition. If I understand the kickstart syntax: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/7/ht… https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/7/ht… My ks.cfg would look like this: bootloader --location=mbr part biosboot --size 1 --fstype="biosboot" part /boot --fstype="xfs" --size=300 part /boot/efi --fstype="efi" --size=300 --fsoptions="umask=0077,shortname=winnt" My bootloader is std RHEL7.0 grub2. Here's my questions. 1. Anaconda will put usual grub2 stuff under /boot/grub2/*? grub.cfg, grubenv, etc? 2. After reboot with BIOS mode, will grub2 expect my vmlinuz/initrd images under /boot? 3. Anaconda will put usual grub2 stuff under /boot/efi ? 4. After reboot with UEFI mode, will grub2 expect my vmlinuz/initrd images under /boot/efi? 5. If I go w/ this auto-dual-boot method, as I add new kernels, how do I keep /boot/grub2/* and /boot/efi/* in sync? will dracut do that for me automatically? Alternatively, it's be OK to have a common partitioning scheme (to make it easy to flip between boot methods). And documentation to my engineers on how to flip between boot methods. Is there a way in my syslinux.cfg to pass an arg to my boot kernel? So that in my ks.cfg %pre section I parse /proc/cmdline to determine whether I'm booted UEFI or BIOS? Or is there an easier way for my ks.cfg %pre section to determine whether it's booted BIOS or UEFI? Spike

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Can't run kickstart without network connection
by LAUTERWASSER Stefan 17 Oct '14

17 Oct '14

Hello, I created kickstart installations in the past (last with Fedora 16), a kickstart installation without network connection wasn't a problem. Actually I try to create a new kickstart installation DVD with Fedora 20. The installation (in text mode) stucks at Installation Overview: 5) [!] Network configuration (Connecting .) I tried out several things: network --hostname=XYZ --onboot no services --disabled=NetworkManager,network,sshd network --hostname=XYZ --bootproto=static network --hostname=XYZ --bootproto=static --noipv4 --noipv6 network --hostname=XYZ --bootproto=static --ip=127.0.1.1 --netmask=255.255.255.0 The problem also occurs without network section. What can I do to workaround these problem? I have no Idea any more. Mit freundlichen Grüßen/Best regards Stefan Lauterwasser Software Engineer Transportation Systems Thales Deutschland

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anaconda/grub2/ostree/uefi/cats/dogs
by Colin Walters 16 Oct '14

16 Oct '14

This is a followup to: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1101359 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1100938 While it's not strictly related to Anaconda the codebase, this is a good mailing list which has the relevant participants, and I find email to be better for architectural discussions than Bugzilla. Now, unfortunately the OSTree model definitely impacts the bootloader situation badly. The fundamental promise of it is that upgrades are atomic, and the way that's implemented is for it to be in control of the bootloader configuration, specifically to perform an atomic replacement. That bootloader configuration then has an ostree= kernel argument which is used in the initramfs. The original design was to use the http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/BootLoaderSpec/ - it had the promise of bootloader-independent configuration. I really liked that idea, as it got me out of the grubby-like model of having to keep up with lots of file formats for the many bootloaders. Peter did add support for the BLS to grub2. However at the time, syslinux didn't implement BLS, and rather than hack it, I cowardly decided to take the easy route and just generate syslinux configs as well. Now fast forward a bit, and mainly Chris convinced me in: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1101359 that the BLS design of having kernels/initramfs on FAT isn't right. See also: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/desktop/2014-June/009962.html There's another thread here, which is that I recently discovered grub2 has support for reading syslinux config files: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/grub.git/tree/grub-core/commands/syslinuxc… This dovetails with a Fedora feature Dennis created to use syslinux config files for u-boot: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/u-boot_syslinux (Incidentally OSTree has code to generate u-boot too: https://git.gnome.org/browse/ostree/tree/src/libostree/ostree-bootloader-ub… that could go away) Now, this offers the opportunity to basically have the unified configuration aspect of the BLS, without anything else. We retain the current way UEFI boots work. OSTree and grubby remain the tools to read/write bootloader configuration (we could entertain some code merging but I don't see that as a priority). One thing to work out with this I think would be how probed entries were merged with static syslinux config entries. Or would we just do probing at install time? Does that all make sense?

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how could get PXE boot device like anaconda's 'ksdevice=bootif' option
by 耳东 16 Oct '14

16 Oct '14

hi guys, I have make a customed livecd with 'livecd-creator'. in the livecd root file system, there was no network config like: /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth* because pxe network device of servers were possible 'eth0' or 'eth1' according to the linked cable. how could I get the pxe boot network device like anaconda's 'ksdevice=bootif' option. So I could get dhcp IP with 'dhclient <bootif_device>' in my init script. thanks.

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Anaconda-devel October 2014