Bug 1447195

Summary: Installer requires unnecessary PReP boot partition for POWER bare metal
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Reporter: David Gibson <dgibson>
Component: anacondaAssignee: Anaconda Maintenance Team <anaconda-maint-list>
Status: CLOSED DUPLICATE QA Contact: Release Test Team <release-test-team-automation>
Severity: unspecified Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 7.4CC: pcahyna
Target Milestone: rc   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: ppc64le   
OS: Unspecified   
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Last Closed: 2017-07-25 03:09:26 UTC Type: Bug
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Description David Gibson 2017-05-02 05:37:18 UTC
Description of problem:

POWER installs under a PAPR hypervisor (either PowerVM or KVM) require a "PPC PReP Boot" partition in which the GRUB image lives.  Anaconda correctly creates such a partition by default, and requires if manual partitioning is used.

However, bare metal ("powernv") installs are different.  The bare metal bootloader, petitboot, actually directly parses grub configuration files off boot partitions and doesn't need a GRUB executable image (and no such image suitable for bare metal POWER anyway).  Therefore the PPC PReP Boot partition is unnecessary.

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

RHEL-7.4-20170501.n.0
grub2-2.02-0.60.el7.ppc64le

How reproducible:

100%

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a kickstart for a POWER bare metal machine
2. Use manual partitioning commands in the .ks files
3. Omit "reqpart" or any explicit directives to create a PPC PReP Boot partition
4. Attempt to install the system

Actual results:

Installer errors out part way complaining of no valid install target

Expected results:

Installer completes, petitboot reads grub config from /boot and can boot new installation.

Additional info:

Comment 2 Pavel Cahyna 2017-07-24 15:46:44 UTC
possibly a duplicate of https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1172791 ?

Comment 3 David Gibson 2017-07-25 03:09:26 UTC
Yes, I think it is.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 1172791 ***