Ubiquity crashs during grub-install on btrfs

[Sean Seago]

After creating btrfs volume via mkfs.btrfs /dev/sda (for example), ubiquity crashes during grub-install.

"grub-install /dev/sda" does not fail or generate an error, however.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 17.10
Package: ubiquity 17.10.8
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.13.0-12.13-generic 4.13.3
Uname: Linux 4.13.0-12-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.7-0ubuntu2
Architecture: amd64
CasperVersion: 1.384
CurrentDesktop: KDE
Date: Mon Oct 9 14:56:15 2017
LiveMediaBuild: Kubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" - Beta amd64 (20171009)
SourcePackage: ubiquity
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

What in the world is this:

Oct 9 19:55:42 kubuntu ubiquity: /usr/share/grub-installer/grub-installer: 1218: [:
Oct 9 19:55:42 kubuntu ubiquity: Illegal number:

[Sean Seago (speedkreature)]

Beats me, but the bug isn't actually new. After talking to some folks at the local LUG and perusing the forums I've seen numerous cases of this issue occurring. There are other bug reports as well, and I believe most of them have been closed as unresolved. The gist of Canonical's stance is this:
Using btrfs to make a whole-disk volume (so that one mounts /dev/nvme0n1 instead of /dev/nvme0n1p1 or /dev/sda instead of /dev/sda1) is unsupported so this isn't a bug but could maybe be resolved with a feature request.

This particular behavior has been around since btrfs was first included as an option on Ubuntu...circa 10.10 if memory serves me right.

What makes this bug different is that it's the first time I've seen the bug cause the installer to crash. Normally it complains about not being able to install grub, I switch over to a terminal and do it manually and everything is swimmingly after that.

Just to clarify, grub-install will install grub on a btrfs volume without errors and it works splendidly but the installer doesn't handle whatever exception occurs as a result of this apparently unorthodox request.

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

I don't think that is related to this error.