Using dynamic kernel/udeb seeds for stable releases is suboptimal

[Breno Leitão]

Installing 14.04.1 daily (2014-12-02) image on a guest (Using Ubuntu as the host) fails, with the following screen:

Installation step failed
An installation step failed. You can try to run the failing item again from the menu, or skip it and choose something else. The
failing step is: Install the system .

Looking at syslog it says:

 Dec 2 16:06:57 base-installer: error: /cdrom/install/filesystem.squashfs has failed to be mounted as squashfs.

I am also attaching the full log here.

[Adam Conrad (adconrad)]

Pretty sure the above attachment isn't actually the logs. ;)

[Breno Leitão (breno-leitao)]

Did you check v2? :-)

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

This is usually out-of-sync kernel versions on the image, though I haven't checked in detail in this particular case.

[Adam Conrad (adconrad)]

It's actually a subtle bug in the CD creation scripts, I think. See the following log snippet and note how some udebs are included twice (once for the version in -proposed, and once for the kernel version on the CD), and some are only including the proposed version. squashfs-modules is in the latter camp, and thus failing to match.

  Adding scsi-modules-3.13.0-40-generic-di to CD 1 ...
  $cd_size = 42554684, $size = 1999610
  Adding scsi-modules-3.13.0-41-generic-di to CD 1 ...
  $cd_size = 44554294, $size = 81322
  Adding serial-modules-3.13.0-40-generic-di to CD 1 ...
  $cd_size = 44635616, $size = 80984
  Adding serial-modules-3.13.0-41-generic-di to CD 1 ...
  $cd_size = 44716600, $size = 60678
  Adding speakup-modules-3.13.0-41-generic-di to CD 1 ...
  $cd_size = 44777278, $size = 22038
  Adding squashfs-modules-3.13.0-41-generic-di to CD 1 ...
  $cd_size = 44799316, $size = 43138
  Adding storage-core-modules-3.13.0-40-generic-di to CD 1 ...
  $cd_size = 44842454, $size = 43506
  Adding storage-core-modules-3.13.0-41-generic-di to CD 1 ...
  $cd_size = 44885960, $size = 88132

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Adam: This is because both e.g. serial-modules and squashfs-modules are pulled in by germinate from linux-udebs-generic, which depends on the latest versions in -proposed; but serial-modules is also pulled in from debian-installer-udebs, which depends on serial-modules-3.13.0-40-generic-di since debian-installer was last built against 3.13.0-40.

Unfortunately, the use of linux-udebs-generic, while convenient for other reasons, means that we can't use the usual Kernel-Version trick in seeds to limit to only the relevant kernel version, because linux-udebs-generic is an unversioned package name and so only the latest one is available in Packages. Using this unversioned package name means that debian-installer *must* be kept up to date, I think.

[Paulo Flabiano Smorigo (pfsmorigo)]

Daily image from yesterday seems broken again. This is the last part of syslog:

Dec 17 10:33:59 main-menu[226]: (process:12262): depmod: WARNING: could not open /lib/modules/3.13.0-43-generic/modules.builtin: No such file or directory
Dec 17 10:33:59 main-menu[226]: INFO: Menu item 'live-installer' selected
Dec 17 10:33:59 base-installer: info: Using squashfs support for /cdrom/install/filesystem.squashfs
Dec 17 10:33:59 anna-install: Installing squashfs-modules
Dec 17 10:33:59 base-installer: error: /cdrom/install/filesystem.squashfs has failed to be mounted as squashfs.
Dec 17 10:33:59 main-menu[226]: (process:14514): unknown udeb squashfs-modules
Dec 17 10:33:59 main-menu[226]: (process:14514): modprobe: ERROR: could not open builtin file '/lib/modules/3.13.0-43-generic/modules.builtin.bin'
Dec 17 10:33:59 main-menu[226]: (process:14514): modprobe: FATAL: Module squashfs not found.
Dec 17 10:33:59 main-menu[226]: (process:14514): modprobe: ERROR: could not open builtin file '/lib/modules/3.13.0-43-generic/modules.builtin.bin'
Dec 17 10:33:59 main-menu[226]: (process:14514): mount: mounting /dev/loop0 on /mnt failed: No such device
Dec 17 10:33:59 main-menu[226]: WARNING **: Configuring 'live-installer' failed with error code 1
Dec 17 10:33:59 main-menu[226]: WARNING **: Menu item 'live-installer' failed.
Dec 17 11:08:01 main-menu[226]: INFO: Modifying debconf priority limit from 'high' to 'medium'
Dec 17 11:08:01 debconf: Setting debconf/priority to medium
Dec 17 11:08:12 main-menu[226]: INFO: Menu item 'di-utils-shell' selected

[Adam Conrad (adconrad)]

I'll probably switch back to the old hardcoding the kernel version in the seeds method only for LTSes, just to avoid this annoyance (and another bug that's equally difficult to work around).

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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