Bug 1060576

Summary:	RFE: on multiple disk installs, always create bootloader partitions on all selected devices
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Chris Murphy <bugzilla>
Component:	anaconda	Assignee:	Anaconda Maintenance Team <anaconda-maint-list>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	unspecified	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	rawhide	CC:	anaconda-maint-list, g.kaviyarasu, jonathan, mads, vanmeeuwen+fedora
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Hardware:	Unspecified
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Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
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Last Closed:	2015-04-14 20:20:02 UTC	Type:	Bug
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oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Embargoed:

Description Chris Murphy 2014-02-02 19:13:04 UTC

Description of problem:
On UEFI, anaconda has no way of permitting creation of an EFI System Partition per physical device chosen. Only one device gets an ESP, and it alone is mounted at /boot/efi. It's easy to do this on BIOS/MBR configurations, since grub is installed to each disk's MBR gap.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
anaconda

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Custom partitioning only permits creation of one ESP on one disk because only one /boot/efi can be created.


Actual results:
Only one disk can have an ESP, if that disk fails, we can't boot. 

This works correctly and seamless to the user on BIOS/MBR setups. It can be done manually with multiple BIOSBoots on BIOS/GPT (inelegant, non-obvious, but it's doable).


Expected results:

Each disk should get an ESP, so that we can always boot in case of a disk failure.


Additional info:
Related to bug 1022316. These required partitions should simply be created for the user, even when they use custom partitioning.

Comment 1 Chris Murphy 2014-03-20 17:17:57 UTC

This is the multiple device version of bug 1022316.

Comment 2 David Shea 2015-04-14 20:20:02 UTC

/boot/efi on RAID1 works fine and can be created with custom partitioning. Doing this automatically doesn't make sense since the rest of a RAID setup isn't automatic either.

Comment 3 Chris Murphy 2015-04-15 00:23:15 UTC

It's non-standard and incompatible with multiboot (including dual-boot). The firmware can write to the ESP and thereby make the md members inconsistent with each other in a way that md can't resolve.

There are two ways to do this consistent with the UEFI spec: 

1. sync the fedora directory on each ESP at install time, and grubby/new-kernel-pkg need to stop modifying the ESP and revert to making changes to /boot like with BIOS systems.

2. narrow the supportable hardware strictly to that which supports firmware RAID.

I also think it's dishonest to say this is notabug. The current design is flawed/bad hack, if it's going to stay this way it should be wontfix.