Note: This bug is displayed in read-only format because the product is no longer active in Red Hat Bugzilla.

Bug 1087090

Summary:	EFI GRUB boot menu is a very long flat list, which makes it hard to navigate
Product:	[Retired] Beaker	Reporter:	Dan Callaghan <dcallagh>
Component:	lab controller	Assignee:	matt jia <mjia>
Status:	CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE	QA Contact:	tools-bugs <tools-bugs>
Severity:	high	Docs Contact:
Priority:	high
Version:	0.16	CC:	abenoit, dcallagh, dgallowa, dowang, ebaak, jburke, mjia, rjoost
Target Milestone:	23.0	Keywords:	FutureFeature, Patch
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	Unspecified
OS:	Unspecified
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Enhancement
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2016-07-07 23:10:29 UTC	Type:	Bug
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:
Bug Depends On:	1248126
Bug Blocks:

Description Dan Callaghan 2014-04-13 23:41:59 UTC

Description of problem:
The PXE menu generated by beaker-pxemenu uses hierarchical menus to split up distros by OSMajor and OSVersion, which helps keep the list manageable when Beaker contains many thousands of distro trees.

However the menu generated for EFI GRUB is just a flat list which makes it painful to select from thousands of entries.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
0.16

How reproducible:
always

Steps to Reproduce:
0. Assuming beaker-pxemenu is running in a cron job,
1. Boot an x86 EFI system (when not running a recipe)
2. See the boot menu containing Beaker distros
3. Start scrolling with the arrow keys and see how far you get before it drives you insane

Actual results:
It's annoying

Expected results:
Something better

Additional info:
We are currently using/assuming GRUB 0.97 which cannot do nested menus. According to the internet GRUB 2.0 can be used for EFI network booting, so we would need to find a suitable image and figure out if that is usable as a replacement for GRUB 0.97 in all cases. If so then we could switch to that, and then start generating GRUB2 config syntax in beaker-pxemenu which includes nested menus.

Comment 2 David Galloway 2015-07-29 16:13:42 UTC

*** Bug 1248121 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 3 Jeff Burke 2015-08-05 20:25:38 UTC

Hi Guys,
 Do you happen to know when this one will be put on the list? Are you waiting for "Good" UEFI hardware for UEFI in beaker stage environment?

Thanks

Comment 4 Dan Callaghan 2015-08-07 05:12:17 UTC

(In reply to Jeff Burke from comment #3)
> Do you happen to know when this one will be put on the list? Are you
> waiting for "Good" UEFI hardware for UEFI in beaker stage environment?

This RFE for nested menus requires first switching to GRUB2 for x86 EFI. There are a few other related bugs covering this, like bug 1156201.

Our answer to this was going to be the switchable netboot loader support, which we originally implemented for the ppc yaboot/grub2 transition in RHEL7.1, but we designed it to allow using GRUB2 on x86 EFI as well. A few months back I experimented with it (using an x86 EFI system we have in our lab here, since there are none usable on beaker-devel) and I actually hit a GRUB2 bug which I had to patch: bug 1211101.

That GRUB2 bug is still ON_QA but we can probably go ahead with the test builds of GRUB2 in order to get netboot working.

The next problem, as you noted, is that we still don't have any working x86 EFI systems on beaker-devel to test this with.

Comment 5 Dan Callaghan 2015-12-01 03:46:51 UTC

I have an x86 EFI system in the lab which I can use for testing GRUB2 menu.

Comment 6 matt jia 2016-04-12 06:25:18 UTC

(In reply to Dan Callaghan from comment #5)
> I have an x86 EFI system in the lab which I can use for testing GRUB2 menu.

I have expanded the beaker-pexemnu to generate GRUB2 boot menus for EFI x86 and ppc64. And also it will generate a GRUB2 configuration with options to load boot menus for x86 and ppc64.


   http://gerrit.beaker-project.org/#/c/4801/

I have tested the boot menus on this system and they work as expected.

Comment 8 matt jia 2016-05-06 01:03:52 UTC

Unfortunately, the ppc64 menus are not working as expected. It is because the firmware of PowerPc systems does not fallback booting from hard disk when exiting from the menu list. In this case, the recipes will never run.
Here is the patch to take out the ppc64 menus.

   https://gerrit.beaker-project.org/#/c/4864/

Comment 11 Dan Callaghan 2016-07-07 23:10:29 UTC

Beaker 23.0 has been released.