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

[Steve Langasek]

> 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).

There is no particular evidence of this being a race condition of any
kind.  The point at which this stops is at the boundary when the
bootloader passes control to the kernel; there are some different video-
related options being set for recovery mode vs. regular mode, but that's
because the ones used for recovery mode are *supposed* to be more
failsafe.

So I'm reassigning this bug to the kernel, and updating the bug
description to match.  Please file separate bug reports for each of the
other issues you've mentioned here, as originally requested.

And for the record, I can also reproduce the sometimes-hang when booting
in recovery mode here.

** Description changed:

  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
+ happen consistently, with latest updates only happens once in a while.
  
  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
+  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)

** Package changed: friendly-recovery (Ubuntu) => linux (Ubuntu)

** Changed in: linux (Ubuntu)
       Status: Confirmed => New

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/863524

Title:
  friendly-recovery changes in oneiric adds complication

Status in “linux” package in Ubuntu:
  Incomplete

Bug description:
  Recovery mode gets stuck on "Loading Initial Ramdisk". This used to
  happen consistently, with latest updates only happens once in a while.

  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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