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Bug 1983098 - It's not easy to find out why installation failed when using boot arguments without inst. prefix
Summary: It's not easy to find out why installation failed when using boot arguments w...
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE
Alias: None
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9
Classification: Red Hat
Component: anaconda
Version: 9.0
Hardware: Unspecified
OS: Unspecified
high
unspecified
Target Milestone: beta
: ---
Assignee: Jiri Konecny
QA Contact: Release Test Team
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks: 1942219
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2021-07-16 13:59 UTC by Jan Stodola
Modified: 2021-12-07 21:23 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

Fixed In Version: anaconda-34.25.0.12-1.el9
Doc Type: If docs needed, set a value
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2021-12-07 21:20:54 UTC
Type: Bug
Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Jan Stodola 2021-07-16 13:59:09 UTC 
Description of problem:
When a boot argument without the "inst." prefix is used, it's not easy to spot the warning message printed by the installer about the necessity to use the "inst." prefix. The warning text is printed quite early in the boot process and scrolls out of the screen very quickly, which makes is unreadable and unnoticeable - especially when the "quiet" boot argument is not used.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
anaconda-34.25.0.10-1.el9

How reproducible:
always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Boot the installer with repo=<path> on the kernel command line (do not use dvd.iso/boot.iso, where install.img might be automatically used), do not use the "quiet" boot argument.

Actual results:
The installation fails (this is expected), but without any obvious reason visible on the screen - the "inst." prefix warning message is scrolled out of the screen and it was visible for a very short time.

Expected results:
A better user experience if a removed boot argument is used to make it more obvious why the installation failed (or why it might fail/not work as expected).

Additional info:
This bug was inspired by bugs 1982793, 1980143, 1969731#c7, so obviously the current solution is not sufficient.
Comment 1 Jan Stodola 2021-07-16 14:06:15 UTC 
A possible solution could be making the text more noticeable and adding a delay to the boot process, for example:

....
[   10.915456] dracut-cmdline[1839]: ************  WARNING  *************
[   10.915456] dracut-cmdline[1839]:
[   10.915456] dracut-cmdline[1839]: Warning: 'repo' is deprecated and has been removed.
[   10.925337] dracut-cmdline[1839]: Warning: All usage of Anaconda boot arguments without 'inst.' prefix was removed. Please use inst.repo instead.
[   10.915456] dracut-cmdline[1839]:
[   10.915456] dracut-cmdline[1839]: Waiting for 10 seconds before continuing the boot process...
....
Comment 3 Jiri Konecny 2021-07-16 15:12:37 UTC 
Hi, I agree that the current solution is not ideal but I wonder what is the best approach to this. Your suggested solution is great but I don't really like to slow down the boot process. It could be possible that something will take some of our commands and in that case we would wait always.

The question is if this is a problem only for stage2/repo or even something else. If the main problem are only these two we could approach this in a way that the boot process will print the warning and wait only if none of these are specified?
Comment 4 Jiri Konecny 2021-07-19 16:34:44 UTC 
I may find the way how to implement this by using Dracut timeout hook. I will try to play with it a bit and see what I'm able to create.
Comment 5 Jiri Konecny 2021-07-22 12:59:30 UTC 
Candidate solution proposed upstream: https://github.com/rhinstaller/anaconda/pull/3533
Comment 7 Jiri Konecny 2021-07-28 12:30:11 UTC 
Merged to Rawhide and created backport for RHEL-9 
https://github.com/rhinstaller/anaconda/pull/3546
Comment 13 Jan Stodola 2021-08-18 08:09:44 UTC 
anaconda-34.25.0.13-1.el9 is present in nightly compose RHEL-9.0.0-20210817.8.

Moving to VERIFIED.
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