[Bug 1065281] Re: Installer crashed when trying to partition 4k/4k sector hard disks

[Kent Baxley]

@James,  Thanks.  I'll be ready to look at your changes at any time.

An additional note:

I was also able to repeat Stuart's work in a pure Ubuntu
environment...there is one trick, though, and we might want to consider
using it in the installer.  Here's what I did:

1) Installed Ubuntu 13.10 and verified that it wouldn't boot.

2) Booted into a live desktop session for 13.10

3) Deleted my swap partition on /dev/sda3 and re-created a 1GB partition
on /dev/sda3 via parted.  I also toggled /dev/sda3 as bootable.

4) Ran mkfs.vfat -s1 /dev/sda3.  We had to tell mkfs.vfat to use one sector per cluster or the format wouldn't work.  Apparently it isn't smart enough to do that on its own, or the tool is still using 512 hard-coded for sector size where it determines how many sectors to use per cluster (which probably isn't surprising).
 
5) Once the fat filesystem was laid down, I mounted up /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda3 and copied the EFI directory and its contents from /dev/sda1 to /dev/sda3.  

6) I rebooted into the EFI menu and the EFI firmware was finally able to
see grubx64.efi by drilling down into the 'boot from file' option in the
EFI menu.  We've never been able to do this before.

I'm wondering if in partman-efi, where we had to start using mkdosfs to
work around some limitations of libparted, we can add the "-s 1" flag to
this code, along with making a  bigger partition to make all of this
work:

from commit.d/format_efi in parman-efi:

 59   log_sector_size="$(blockdev --getss "$(cat device)")"
 60                        if log-output -t partman --pass-stdout \
 61                           mkdosfs -F "${new_efi_fs#fat}" \
 62                                   -S "$log_sector_size" \
 63                                   "$device" >/dev/null; then
 64                                sync
 65                                status=OK

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Title:
  Installer crashed when trying to partition 4k/4k sector hard disks

Status in The Dell PowerEdge project:
  In Progress
Status in OEM Priority Project:
  Fix Committed
Status in OEM Priority Project precise series:
  In Progress
Status in OEM Priority Project quantal series:
  In Progress
Status in OEM Priority Project raring series:
  Fix Released
Status in Release Notes for Ubuntu:
  Invalid
Status in Release Notes for Ubuntu quantal series:
  Triaged
Status in “dosfstools” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in “efibootmgr” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in “partman-base” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in “partman-basicfilesystems” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in “partman-efi” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in “dosfstools” source package in Precise:
  Fix Committed
Status in “efibootmgr” source package in Precise:
  Triaged
Status in “partman-base” source package in Precise:
  Triaged
Status in “partman-basicfilesystems” source package in Precise:
  Fix Committed
Status in “partman-efi” source package in Precise:
  Fix Committed
Status in “dosfstools” source package in Quantal:
  Fix Committed
Status in “efibootmgr” source package in Quantal:
  Triaged
Status in “partman-base” source package in Quantal:
  Triaged
Status in “partman-basicfilesystems” source package in Quantal:
  Fix Committed
Status in “partman-efi” source package in Quantal:
  Fix Committed

Bug description:
  partman_server crashes on Ubuntu 12.10 server for amd64 when trying to
  partition an Advanced Format (4k / 4k sector) hard disk.

  Disks that utilize 4k sectors with 512 emulation work fine.  The
  installer has no problems with those.

  Steps to Reproduce:
  1) Begin the installation in EFI mode. 
  2) At the disk partitioning stage, select "Guided use Entire Disk" or "Manual"
  3) Review and accept the proposed partitioning scheme and write changes to disk. 

  Actual Results:
  The system will attempt to create a the EFIboot partition.  At this stage the installer appears to hang.   Pressing Ctrl+AltF4 reveals that parted_server has crashed with the following message:

  parted_server[13865]: segfault at 22fa000 ip 00007fa6eb74bee7 sp
  00007fffec3ab500 error 4 in libparted.so.0.0.1[7fa6eb735000+64000]

  Expected results:
  Installation should carry on without a crash.

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