Ubuntu
grub2 package

  1. Bug #1443735
  2. Comment #0

Comment 0 for bug 1443735

Revision history for this message
Robie Basak (racb) wrote : recordfail false positive causes headless servers to hang on boot

Steps to reproduce:

1. Boot a Vivid system installed from the server installer (not a cloud image).
2. Kill the power (or VM) while the kernel is initialising but before it has started init.
3. Power up the system (or start the VM) again.

Expected behaviour: the system should boot without user intervention.

Actual behaviour: the system hangs on the grub prompt.

This was previously raised in bug 669481 but the solution applied then was just to add the RECORDFAIL_TIMEOUT setting defaulted to -1. This allowed users to work around the problem by tuning RECORDFAIL_TIMEOUT. I'm filing this bug separately as there is nothing wrong with the previous fix, but it didn't fix the problem for users by default. This bug is about fixing the default so that users don't have to discover and work around the issue.

An IRC discussion (http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2015/02/27/%23ubuntu-devel.html#t13:54) concluded that everyone involved in the discussion is happy to change the timeout from infinity to 30s.

Colin asked for a fix in Debian, so I'll send a patch there and add a bug link. I'm also filing the bug here in order to track the fix in both Debian and Ubuntu.

Importance: High because of the impact to users on headless servers - from their perspective, this causes a system to fail to boot after an appropriately timed double power cut. I'm prompted to do this today because it just happened to me on my server, so perhaps it's more likely than I originally thought.