[2.2RC3] MAAS doesn't handle switching BIOS from Legacy to UEFI

[Ante Karamatić]

When MAAS is used to manage systems with legacy BIOS, all disks have MBR partition table. If one tries to switch BIOS from legacy to UEFI, ideally all should go smoothly. Due to UEFI/MBR incompatibilities, recommissioning of the nodes (and data loss) is unfortunately expected.

However, recommissioning the nodes is not enough. Despite presenting the user with clean sda (or whatever the disk is), MAAS still re-creates the same partitioning table that was on the disk previously. This results with a node that is not bootable.

User has to delete partitions manually and recreate /boot/efi and / partitions, deploy and then recommission again. At that stage, MAAS will continue setting up GPT on disks.

[Ante Karamatić (ivoks)]

This is part of 00-maas-01-lshw (presented in xml). It comes from the node that did UEFI boot:

TFTP Request - grubx64.efi
TFTP Request - bootx64.efi
TFTP Request - bootx64.efi

[Andres Rodriguez (andreserl)]

@Ante,

So If I understand correctly, this happens:

1. Machines are set to legacy in BIOS
2. MAAS commissions, pxe boots, and creates MBR
3. MAchines are set to UEFI in BIOS
4. MAAS commissions, machine pxe boots, and keep things with MBR
5. User has to manually create / and /efi

That said, can you please provide the machine event logs when (2) and (4) are happening ?

[Ante Karamatić (ivoks)]

I've updated MAAS to rc4 before running the test, and it appears that this problem is gone in RC4. MAAS now shows that GPT will be created. I've tried reverting to RC3 and recommissioning again, but it still says GPT.

You can leave this bug as Incomplete. If problem doesn't reappear again, we can assume rc4 solved it. Best I can do now is provide events from 'failed' commissioning, but I don't think that will give you any sensible data.

[Andres Rodriguez (andreserl)]

Hi!

**This is an automated message**

We believe this is may no longer be an issue in the latest MAAS release. Due to the original date of the bug report, we are currently marking it as Invalid. If you believe this bug report still valid against the latest release of MAAS, or if you are still interested in this, please re-open this bug report.

Thanks