installing on NVMe fails no disk with serial

[Jóhann Friðriksson]

While installing Ubuntu Server 18.04.2: curtin seems to compose the serial (id) for my NVMe storage incorrectly.
Right after I give the installer the go-ahead to perform the installation (with nothing but default values) the command: ['curtin', 'block-meta', 'simple'] fails. The tracedump says:
ValueError: no disk with serial 'THNSN5512GPU7_NVMe_TOSHIBA_512GB_________76KS12H7T5ZV' found.
Under '/dev/disk/by-id' there indeed is no "nvme-THNSN5512GPU7_NVMe_TOSHIBA_512GB_________76KS12H7T5ZV" but rather "nvme-THNSN5512GPU7_NVMe_TOSHIBA_512GB__76KS12H7T5ZV" (missing 7 of the underscores)

Workaround:
Rebooting back to the installer, and before doing anything else, switch to a different terminal and manually create a symlink with the name curtis expects to find: cd /dev/disk/by_id ; ln -s ../../nvme0n1 nvme-THNSN5512GPU7_NVMe_TOSHIBA_512GB_________76KS12H7T5ZV
After that the installation goes fine.

[Ryan Harper (raharper)]

Thanks for the report.

I suspect subiquity may need to validate the serial value with what's present in /dev/disk/by-id to ensure that curtin finds the same device here.

[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

Uhh is there some kind of special processing done where the device serial reported by udev is _not_ the name of the symlink in /dev/disk/by-id? Because that would be angry-making.

[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

Ah well I see the rules (as in rules.d/60-persistent-storage.rules) for nvme really are different, so yes, probably need to look into this a bit.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.