"running 'curtin hook'" spinner keeps spinning forever

[Paride Legovini]

Last seen in subiquity 21.01.1 (amd64, build 2255), but I think this little issue was present even before. In the last stage of the install process, when Subiquity shows "Install complete!", the "running 'curtin hook'" spinner ('| / - \' loop) in the install log keeps spinning forever. This can be a bit confusing.

This is always reproducible just by finishing an installation.
Screenshot attached.

[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

Yeah I've seen this occasionally too. It seems the subiquity process isn't getting all the curtin events from the journal somehow -- I don't really know what's going on though.

[dann frazier (dannf)]

I just ran into this with the focal RC installer on arm64 (20210201.2)

[dann frazier (dannf)]

I've now seen this 3/3 of times on Cavium ThunderX CRB installs.

[Ubuntu QA Website (ubuntuqa)]

This bug has been reported on the Ubuntu ISO testing tracker.

A list of all reports related to this bug can be found here:
http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/reports/bugs/1912957

[Taihsiang Ho (tai271828)]

Interesting, I did not see this on ThunderX2 Sabre (20210201.2) via CD installation.

[Paride Legovini (paride)]

In qemu installs I see this almost always, if now always.

[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

So I did have a quick look at this. What should happen is that curtin sends an event to the journal to report that the curthooks stage has stopped. The subiquity server reads this from the journal and sends out another journal event so that the clients can report that this stage has stopped. I see all the curtin events I expect to see, but not the one the subiquity server should be sending to its clients. I don't know whether the subiquity server is not receiving the curtin event or if its attempt to send the event is failing. There is nothing in the journal about events being dropped that I can see.

It's strange to me that this is so consistent. Maybe one of the curthooks does something to disrupt the journal on the host? Seems unlikely...

[Balint Reczey (rbalint)]

Observed in QEMU after setting up custom partition layout with encrypted LVM and btrfs partition + swap partition in it. I'm not sure it the details matter if it it almost always seen in QEMU anyway.

[Balint Reczey (rbalint)]

I think this is quit confusing, because the spinning / catches the eye earlier than the 'Installation complete!' text on top.

I think I concluded that the installer was still running and left it running for the night, despite it actually finished already. :-)

[Dan Kegel (dank)]

Affects Virtualbox installs too, even though I let the installer autoupdate itself.

Rebooted after a few minutes and the install seems to have worked.

[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

Oh turns out this was something silly (subiquity stops listening for events from curtin the instant the curtin process exits, but it can take a while for journal events to make it through so we could miss the last few). Working on a fix now.

[enrigp (enrgarc)]

Same problem here with ubuntu server 20.04.2 lts install on proxmox vm (qemu)

[enrigp (enrgarc)]

Capture

[Scott Stubbs (sastubbs84)]

So I had this same thing happen to me while installing server 20.04.2, running curtin hook just kept spinning. However at the top of the screen it stated "installation complete", I went to reboot now and it indeed installed itself successfully.

[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

Yes, this affects the version on 20.04.2 and is just cosmetic. Fixed in hirsute, current focal dailies and will be fixed in 20.04.3.

[Uqbar (uqbar)]

Still here as of 20.04.2

[Ketil Malde (ketil-ii)]

Seen here on 20.10 server install iso.