[Bug 1775249] Re: grub2 FTBFS on amd64 and i386 due to test failures

[Łukasz Zemczak]

So, what happened is that with seabios 1.11.1-1 a serial console has
been implemented and enabled by default, redirecting all VGA output
(SERCON is by default y). There was no such thing before and this is now
causing issues. It would be unwise to try and change the default, as we
would introduce a delta against Debian. There's a workaround we can use
which solves the problem.

The grub2 test suite relies on serial output as this is how grub-shell
communicates with the tests being run. Thankfully, seabios has support
for runtime configuration, which is done through the fw_cfg interface in
qemu. Passing "-fw_cfg name=etc/sercon-port,string=0" to the qemu-
system-* calls in grub-shell forces seabios to use a different port for
its own output, therefore not interfering with what is used by grub.
There's an additional warning printed out, but it doesn't seem to
interfere with the actual tests.

I am currently test-building that to make sure it's enough to make grub2
buildable again. If yes, I will release it to cosmic and then forward to
Debian - as they're also affected by the same change.

** Changed in: seabios (Ubuntu)
       Status: New => Won't Fix

** Changed in: grub2 (Ubuntu)
       Status: New => In Progress

** Changed in: grub2 (Ubuntu)
     Assignee: (unassigned) => Łukasz Zemczak (sil2100)

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1775249

Title:
  grub2 FTBFS on amd64 and i386 due to test failures

Status in grub2 package in Ubuntu:
  In Progress
Status in seabios package in Ubuntu:
  Won't Fix

Bug description:
  Something in the archive caused grub2 to start to FTBFS in cosmic as
  seen in the 2.02-2ubuntu9 version currently in cosmic-proposed:

  https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/2.02-2ubuntu9

  A no-change rebuild of 2.02-2ubuntu8 also fails in the same way.

  After some basic investigation, I have noticed that possibly something
  changed in qemu between bionic and cosmic, causing qemu-system-i386 to
  print out SeaBIOS output to the serial console. Some of the tests
  depend on reading output of qemu-system-i386 (through the serial
  console) and those are now failing as it is all prepended with bios
  output - while in bionic it was not. This might be only one part of
  the problem though.

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