Bug 2000140

Description of problem:

In RHEL 9 Anaconda boot options without inst. prefix were removed/replaced with options starting with inst. prefix (bug 1947376).
For the ksdevice option it means the change from "ksdevice" to "inst.ks.device", which also the warning on installation terminal says:

<snip>
Starting installer, one moment...
12:49:45.
############## Installer errors encountered during boot ##############
'ksdevice' is deprecated and has been removed.
All usage of Anaconda boot arguments without 'inst.' prefix was removed. Please use inst.ks.device instead.
</snip>

Much of the functionality of the ksdevice boot option has been replaced in RHEL7 and RHEL8. AFAIK the only remaining valid use is documented in "Performing an advanced RHEL installation" guide, section "B.4.1. network (optional)":

"If the --device= option is missing on the first use of the network command, the value of the ksdevice= Anaconda boot option is used, if available. Note that this is considered deprecated behavior; in most cases, you should always specify a --device= for every network command. "


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

RHEL 9.0 Beta, for example
RHEL-9.0.0-20210831.d.4
anaconda-34.25.0.15-1.el9


How reproducible:

Always


Steps to Reproduce:

Run installation on a system with two network devices, eg ens3 and ens7, using these boot options:

ip=ens3:dhcp inst.ks.device=ens7

and this network command in kickstart:

network --bootproto dhcp

Which means:
- ens3 device should be configured and activated in initramfs
- ens7 device in stage 2 based on kickstart configuration using inst.ks.device option to supply missing --device option of the network command


Actual results:

The kickstart configuration is not applied to the device ens7.


Expected results:

The kickstart configuration is applied to the device ens7.


Additional info:

Replacing the inst.ks.device with ksdevice the result is as expected.

There is a question if we really also want to remove support for ksdevice (non-prefixed) option in RHEL 9.0 because inst.ks.device has never been a valid boot option - unlike some other options where for some time (RHEL 8?) both inst. prefixed and non-prefixed version worked, for example "repo" and "inst.repo".

Upstream PR adding support for inst.ks.device and removing support for ksdevice:
https://github.com/rhinstaller/anaconda/pull/3587