[Bug 1695666] Re: users shoot themselves in the foot by removing /boot/efi from /etc/fstab; u-r-u should warn and refuse to let them upgrade

[Steve Langasek]

On Wed, Jun 07, 2017 at 06:08:25PM -0000, Adam Conrad wrote:
> >From the POV of "u-r-u shouldn't be a dumping ground for quirking
> upgrade issues we can fix in packages", shouldn't this check be in
> preinsts for the packages that twiddle /boot/efi, not in the upgrader?

No, because the preinst is also run in the middle of the upgrade and causes
the upgrade overall to fail.

> Also, can we do better here (like we do with non-mounted bootloader
> partitions, like PReP) and somehow automatically detect the correct
> partition and mount it before attempting to use it?

If you detect multiple ESPs, how do you decide which one to mount?

(It's possible that yes, we could work this out based on things like current
efibootmgr settings, but I think it would be somewhat error prone and you
would still want to detect it all before starting the dist-upgrade.)

blkid -t PARTUUID=$(efibootmgr -v | awk '/^Boot..... ubuntu\t/ { print
$NF }' | cut -f3 -d,)

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1695666

Title:
  users shoot themselves in the foot by removing /boot/efi from
  /etc/fstab; u-r-u should warn and refuse to let them upgrade

Status in ubuntu-release-upgrader package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  We currently have 6 open bug reports at
  <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/shim-signed>, and several
  closed ones, from users who have by one means or another gotten
  /boot/efi unmounted on their systems and then tried to apply updates.

  On a UEFI system, /boot/efi must be a separate mount point (it's the
  EFI System Partition); and it must be mounted at the time of upgrading
  the shim-signed/grub-efi-amd64 packages, because it's meaningless to
  "upgrade" these packages without installing the new bootloader to the
  ESP - if you don't want to use the Ubuntu UEFI bootloader, uninstall
  the package.

  However, a surprising number of users (i.e., more than 0) are leaving
  /boot/efi unmounted on their systems, and as a result get upgrade
  failures.  This is a bad thing to have happen in the middle of a dist-
  upgrade between releases.

  I think u-r-u should detect the case where either of the shim-signed
  and grub-efi-amd64 packages are installed, and /boot/efi is not in a
  sane state (is mountpoint + is mounted rw), and refuse to let the user
  start the upgrade until this is resolved.

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