Serial console device required for runcmd to take effect

[James Slagle]

Not sure if this should actually be considered a bug or not. But, figured I'd submit it anyway.

My cloud image is ubuntu-13.10, amd64, downloaded from here: http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/saucy/current/saucy-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk1.img. I'm testing locally in libvirt with virsh, etc.

I'm using the OpenStack Config Drive as my only data source. It provides a user_data file that has the following contents:

#cloud-config
runcmd:
  - touch /cloudinit-runcmd-done

I could not get that "touch" command to run. To help debug, I added the following line as well:

output: {all: '| tee -a /var/log/cloud-init-output.log'}

After adding that line, I noticed that the touch command ran fine. So, to summarize: w/o an output:{...} line in the user-data, my runcmd does not execute. Eventually I narrowed the issue down to the fact that my vm was missing a defined serial console. After adding the following to my libvirt xml for my vm, my runcmd runs fine with *or* without an output line in the user-data:

    <serial type='pty'>
      <target port='0'/>
    </serial>
    <console type='pty'>
      <target type='serial' port='0'/>
    </console>

The only thing I can figure is that adding the output line, causes util.fix_output to get executed which must trigger something so that cloud-init keeps running to the stage where runcmd's are executed.

[James Slagle (james-slagle)]

Further, it's not just runcmd's that don't get executed with no serial console defined and no output line in the user_data.

It actually seems the entire /etc/init/cloud-config.conf upstart job is never started and thus the cloud-final.conf job as a result. Which would explain why the runcmd's aren't run.

When I login to the vm via ssh, I see a warning that the locale has not been compiled, which should happen as well as part of cloud-config.conf:
_____________________________________________________________________
WARNING! Your environment specifies an invalid locale.
 This can affect your user experience significantly, including the
 ability to manage packages. You may install the locales by running:

   sudo apt-get install language-pack-en
     or
   sudo locale-gen en_US.UTF-8

To see all available language packs, run:
   apt-cache search "^language-pack-[a-z][a-z]$"
To disable this message for all users, run:
   sudo touch /var/lib/cloud/instance/locale-check.skip
_____________________________________________________________________

[Scott Moser (smoser)]

Related bugs:
 * bug 1122245: booting from a cloud image hangs until virsh console is used
 * bug 1061977: Machine fails to commission when console=ttyS0 is present on kernel opts
 * bug 1016695: add console=tty1 to cloud-image kernel boot parameters
 * bug 1123220: cloud-image VM causes kernel panic if image is resized
 * bug 1061977: Machine fails to commission when console=ttyS0 is present on kernel opts

I'm marking this as a dupe of bug 1123220. There is more conversation there. The main issue is not being able to pick a /dev/console in any sane and predictable manner.

Thoughts or suggestions are welcome.