[Bug 863524] Re: friendly-recovery changes in oneiric adds complication

[Launchpad Bug Tracker]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

** Changed in: friendly-recovery (Ubuntu)
       Status: New => Confirmed

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Title:
  friendly-recovery changes in oneiric adds complication

Status in “friendly-recovery” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Recovery mode gets stuck on "Loading Initial Ramdisk". This used to
  happen consistently, with latest updates only happens once in a while
  (indicative of a race condition that does not alway end in the same
  order). When I am able to access recovery mode, keyboard input freezes
  after the kernel loads. This blocks me from selecting recovery options
  in the curses interface. Recovery menu does not present the same
  options as it used to. This change[1] was not documented [2].

  Q: In Oneiric when you boot into recovery mode, you get 
  resume		Resume normal boot
  fsck		        Check all file systems (will exit read-only mode)
  remount	Remount / read/write and mount all other file systems
  root		Drop to root shell prompt
  I want to use netroot or dpkg, what do I do? 
  A: fsck or remout.

  I was told that the menu changing, is a feature - not a bug, necessary
  in order to give users the full range of recovery. If we mount the
  filesystem read-write at the beginning, you can't do certain kinds of
  filesystem recovery. Can't bring up the network in ro.

  This new feature bothers me and I don't think it will be well
  understood by the end user. Perhaps there is a better way to implement
  this change. I preferred the old static menu. From what I understand
  fsck should run automatically in ro if dirty filesystems were detected
  and issues are not correctable (or if it had passed a number of boots
  without a check, it would then preform a check). As I understand it,
  the older menu was mounting everything read/write and starting all the
  system services before showing the recovery menu.

  Some other things we need to test in recovery-menu which often fail:
  telinit freezes (test going from recovery mode to runlevel 0-5)
  resume does not bring me to lightdm, only to a text login prompt
  netroot runs dhclient even though the machine already grabs an address when booting (what is the point of netroot *and* root)
  Running /lib/friendly-recovery/recovery-menu from gnome-terminal, I still have to do remount. It doesn't detect that the root filesystem is already mounted. Why does friendly-recovery assume I am running it at boot time in ro?

  cryptsetup and ecryptfs are not installed. This is a vanilla oneiric
  install, updated on a test machine, all intel (no restricted drivers).
  friendly-recovery is at 0.2.18.

  Please let me know how you would like to proceed. If you need separate
  bugs. Let me know how to split them and I will create a bug. This is
  simply a request for review of recovery-menu code since there are many
  issues in oneiric.

  [1] https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/friendly-recovery/+changelog
  [2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RecoveryMode

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
  Package: friendly-recovery 0.2.18
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-12.19-generic 3.0.4
  Uname: Linux 3.0.0-12-generic i686
  ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu2
  Architecture: i386
  Date: Fri Sep 30 13:36:08 2011
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" - Beta i386 (20110913)
  PackageArchitecture: all
  ProcEnviron:
   LANGUAGE=en_CA:en
   LANG=en_CA.UTF-8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  SourcePackage: friendly-recovery
  UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-09-30 (0 days ago)

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