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For some time there has been an intermittent problem with boot.iso creation where the /proc system in the installroot would vanish during the install. adamw finally managed to track it down using the fedora openqa system and some tests he added and the problem ends up being that systemd-tmpfiles has a 30d rule on /var/tmp/ where lorax installs the rpms. Some of the timestamps, especially from the filesystem package, are older than 30 days. So if systemd-tmpfiles runs during a build it will erase some of the files and directories. It runs 15m after boot and once a day, which explains why it was so hard to track down.
Upstream systemd has proposed a fix using locks, but in the meantime I have this work-around which will prevent it from happening:
https://github.com/weldr/lorax/pull/571
This also requires a SELinux change, otherwise the temporary directories aren't completely deleted at boot time (they leave shadow- and opasswd, so it won't fill up the filesystem, but looks messy).
The Fedora selinux-policy bug is #1668054
After discussing the SELinux change with Lukas Vrabec it's obvious that I'll have to come up with a different way to cleanup orphaned lorax tempdirs -- we cannot allow tmpfiles to cleanup the shadow files w/o compromising security for the whole system. I'll post a new PR soon.
Reproduced using lorax-28.14.22-1.el8 and calling "/usr/bin/systemd-tmpfiles --clean" while lorax was running - this broke the process in different ways depending on when systemd-tmpfiles was executed.
Verified using lorax-28.14.23-1.el8, the installation images were successfully created while running:
# while sleep 1; do /usr/bin/systemd-tmpfiles --clean; done
during the whole lorax process. The created boot.iso successfully booted in a VM.
Moving to VERIFIED.