Zesty installation on ppc64le not working at all

[Guilherme Tiaki Sato]

I’m trying to install Ubuntu 17.04 on a ppc64le server, however the system does not boot after the installation is completed.

I can install Ubuntu 16.04 using the same settings without any problems. I tried guided partitioning with and without LVM using netboot and ISO image installer.

[Breno Leitão (breno-leitao)]

Hello Guilherme, could you please attach the installation logs? You can do it by exiting to shell, at d-i, and grabbing the logs at /var/log.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

Ubuntu 17.04 certainly was installable and bootable at release time, and the boot media have not changed since. In addition to the installation logs, please tell us what model of system you're installing on. If it's not bootable after install, is it possible that this is a firmware/bmc configuration issue, and the system is not configured to boot from the drive?

[Guilherme Tiaki Sato (guilhermetiaki)]

I'm installing on an IBM S822L

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

And this is an installation in PowerNV mode?

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

Sorry, answered that last question for myself looking at the hardware summary.

[Manoj Iyer (manjo)]

We do not have the IBM S822L hardware available in our lab for us to be able to recreate this issue. Could you please advice if this is still and issue? If not can we close this bug?

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

We do have 22L systems in our lab, and I have just done a test netboot install on one using the 17.04 netboot installer from <http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/dists/zesty/main/installer-ppc64el/current/images/netboot/ubuntu-installer/ppc64el/>. This installed successfully, Ubuntu showed up in the petitboot menu, and it could be booted successfully.

This was with guided partitioning, non LVM, on the first disk.

So I think we need more information here to understand what you're seeing happen after the install completes.

[Guilherme Tiaki Sato (guilhermetiaki)]

Steve, as you said it worked I decided to test in another model, so I tried to install on an IBM S822LC and it works. Is the machine you used is an S822L (8247-22L)? Because I still cannot install on the S822L. I'm attaching some screenshots.

Image 1 - Creating Petitboot item using the same netboot files you used.
Image 2 - Partition used (Guided)
Image 3 - Installation completed
Image 4 - Any boot option on Petitboot

The options I choose seems to be the same you used, and I also used these options to install on the S822LC.

Let me know if you need any additional info.

[Manoj Iyer (manjo)]

guilhermetiaki, All the 22L systems we have are 8247-22L Tuleta.

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

Looking at the log, something odd is shown:
Jul 28 17:46:03 main-menu[1401]: (process:68930): Volume group "sda" not found
Jul 28 17:46:03 main-menu[1401]: (process:68930): Cannot process volume group sda
Jul 28 17:46:04 main-menu[1401]: INFO: Menu item 'finish-install' selected

Could you please confirm that the disks (/dev/sda _and_ /dev/sdb) visible during the installation are:
1) wiped clean
2) do not have any remains of any ubuntu installation
3) do not have any remains of any lvm metadata
4) are not used as part of LVM
5) and lvm volumes or groups are not named with names that class with normal devices, e.g. "sda" is not used a a volume group name

[Guilherme Tiaki Sato (guilhermetiaki)]

During the installation I deleted all existing LVM volume groups and logical volumes; created a new empty partition table on both disks and then partitioned using guided partition without LVM on the first disk.

Is there anything else I should do?

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

@guilhermetiaki
The attached logs suggest that LVM was in use, with either hostname or volume group name manually specified as "sda" which may result in failures (due to device names clashing existing disks).
Please attach new logs, where installation is started and disk drives are not in a bad state (e.g. partial left over LVM volume group with incomplete set of physical drives visible).

[Guilherme Tiaki Sato (guilhermetiaki)]

Hello, Dimitri

Sorry, I was referring to the most recent installation I did, when I took the screenshots (comment #13 above).

Anyway, I tried both with and without LVM, and when I used LVM I used guided partitioning, so the volume group name was set automatically and was not "sda".

I'm attaching new logs from an installation without LVM. I used the same partition scheme showed on comment #13 and the process described on comment #18 to clean the disk from previous installation.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be anything in the logs that accounts for this failure. This suggests a difference in the firmware configuration between the systems where you see this failure, and the systems that we have in our lab. What version of OPAL do you have? Your screenshots seem to show a rather old version of petitboot (dev.20141013) but I don't know how that maps to opal versions.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

Spot-checking one of our systems, for example, shows a petitboot version of v1.2.7-a4dfe9b.

[Guilherme Tiaki Sato (guilhermetiaki)]

Steve, I was able to find the firmware version at ASM: FW810.20 (SV810_101). Not sure if this is what you're asking.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

On Tue, Nov 14, 2017 at 12:13:28AM -0000, Guilherme Tiaki Sato wrote:
> Steve, I was able to find the firmware version at ASM: FW810.20
> (SV810_101). Not sure if this is what you're asking.

Thanks. That seems to be quite an old version, older than anything we have
in the lab - the oldest firmware revision we have, per previous guidance
from IBM, is SV810_126. Do IBM consider SV810_101 supported? I know we
have seen bugs in firmware / nvram state where systems would fail to boot
from disk following a netboot, and I think it's possible this is one of
them.

[Guilherme Tiaki Sato (guilhermetiaki)]

After updating the firmware to FW860.41 (SV860_127), I can confirm that indeed it solves the issue. I was able to install both 17.04 and 17.10.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

Thanks for confirming. Closing as invalid.