Bug 2192822

Summary: [RFE] "die()" function doesn't let the user see what's wrong with dracut
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Reporter: Renaud Métrich <rmetrich>
Component: anacondaAssignee: Anaconda Maintenance Team <anaconda-maint-list>
Status: CLOSED MIGRATED QA Contact: Release Test Team <release-test-team-automation>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 9.1CC: awilliam, dtardon, jkonecny
Target Milestone: rcKeywords: FutureFeature, MigratedToJIRA
Target Release: ---Flags: pm-rhel: mirror+
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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Last Closed: 2023-09-18 16:35:07 UTC Type: Story
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Renaud Métrich 2023-05-03 07:46:51 UTC
Description of problem:

The die() function halts the system on error:
-------- 8< ---------------- 8< ---------------- 8< ---------------- 8< --------
 447 die() {
 :
 467     if [ -n "$DRACUT_SYSTEMD" ]; then
 468         systemctl --no-block --force halt
 469     fi
 470 
 471     exit 1
 472 }
-------- 8< ---------------- 8< ---------------- 8< ---------------- 8< --------

Halting the system doesn't poweroff the system, which should let the user understand what's going on.
Unfortunately, on many real hardware, including Lenovo T460s, it appears that as soon as the system is halted, the display is powered off, preventing the user from seeing the reason for dracut dying.

This is particularly annoying when the user tries to boot a RHEL ISO which appears to be corrupted: the corruption is detected and immediately after the display goes blank.

I'm proposing to add a 30 seconds delay before halting, which should be sufficient, something like this below:
-------- 8< ---------------- 8< ---------------- 8< ---------------- 8< --------
 447 die() {
 448     {
 :
 467     if [ -n "$DRACUT_SYSTEMD" ]; then
 468         echo "<24>dracut: Halting the system in 30 seconds" > /dev/kmsg
 469         sleep 30
 470         echo "<24>dracut: Halting the system" > /dev/kmsg
 471         systemctl --no-block --force halt
 472     fi
 :
-------- 8< ---------------- 8< ---------------- 8< ---------------- 8< --------

We could do better, such as asking the user to confirm through hitting Enter, but it's more complicated to implement, since it requires spawning a one-shot service that takes control of the console.

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

dracut-057

How reproducible:

Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Corrupt a RHEL ISO

  # dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/iso seek=200M count=10 bs=1 conv=notrunc

2. Boot the ISO on real hardware (QEMU/KVM doesn't reproduce because the screen doesn't blank)

  It reproduces on Lenovo T460s, ASUS Chromebook C202S, ASUS M415U Notebook and HP envy360 at least.

Actual results:

Corruption detection message + screen blanking immediately after

Expected results:

Corruption detection message + screen not blanking

Comment 1 David Tardon 2023-05-17 07:51:57 UTC
(In reply to Renaud Métrich from comment #0)
> I'm proposing to add a 30 seconds delay before halting, which should be
> sufficient, something like this below:
>  467     if [ -n "$DRACUT_SYSTEMD" ]; then
>  468         echo "<24>dracut: Halting the system in 30 seconds" > /dev/kmsg
>  469         sleep 30
>  470         echo "<24>dracut: Halting the system" > /dev/kmsg
>  471         systemctl --no-block --force halt
>  472     fi

No, that's wrong. die() might have started emergency shell (if rd.shell= is set), in which case the extra delay is just annoying. IMHO this should be done via a shutdown-emergency hook created by anaconda.

Comment 2 Jiri Konecny 2023-05-18 09:13:09 UTC
Hi, adding shutdown-emergency hook into Anaconda is something new we need to discover and implement. Thus marking this as RFE for Anaconda.

Comment 3 RHEL Program Management 2023-09-18 16:32:28 UTC
Issue migration from Bugzilla to Jira is in process at this time. This will be the last message in Jira copied from the Bugzilla bug.

Comment 4 RHEL Program Management 2023-09-18 16:35:07 UTC
This BZ has been automatically migrated to the issues.redhat.com Red Hat Issue Tracker. All future work related to this report will be managed there.

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Comment 5 Adam Williamson 2023-10-30 23:29:00 UTC
This is only the case when the initramfs has DRM drivers in it and KMS has kicked in before the die() happens. If that's not the case, the message remains visible. We worked this out over in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2246410 .