Unable to install from a recovery partition on ubiquity 2.1.29 and later

[Mario Limonciello]

Binary package hint: ubiquity

I'm trying to perform an installation from a recovery partition that would install into the remaining free space on the drive. The last time I'm able to successfully install is from a 03/02 live CD image containing ubiquity 2.1.28.

Upgrading that to 2.1.29 while in live mode or using any image containing a newer version gives me the following:

"WARNING: the kernel failed to re-read the partition table on /dev/sda (Device or resource busy). As a result, it may not reflect all of your changes until after reboot."

I'll attach the partman log associated with the error.

[Mario Limonciello (superm1)]

Here is the preseed that was in use during install:

http://linux.dell.com/git/?p=ubuntu-fid.git;a=blob;f=framework/preseed/dell.seed;h=9b69a493ec2b4b0b5fa24f83d5fee5513fcb7fd7;hb=c683cf476b15810705a654a2cb618e3c47d7a7ad

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I'm aware of this bug but am currently prioritising sorting out other issues with parted 2.2 so that I have a stable base to work on. I'll look at this after that.

[Mario Limonciello (superm1)]

For experimentations sake, i've replaced the exception handler note question
in partman_commit with a call to 'partx -a /dev/sda' for a minimal solution
and this appears to work. This is of course specific to this type of
scenario where installing into free space on the drive booted from.

Of course all that partx is doing is using the BLKPG ioctl to notify the
kernel of the additional partitions and generate events for udev to populate
those device nodes.

So if implementing a BLKPG ioctl in parted_server or parted is out of the
question because of deviating upstream whom wanted to move away from BLKPG
in the first place, a preseedable custom exception handler would be fine
with me.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I'm considering switching back to BLKPG (perhaps as a fallback), but
want to think about it a bit more. I want to avoid having to ignore
exceptions as much as humanly possible.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Phillip Susi is working on this as bug 540940. Although this bug was filed earlier, I'm going to mark it as a duplicate of that one since that one has a better status, patch history, etc.