grub package in xenial-proposed will change boot order for a MaaS deployed system

[Po-Hsu Lin]

This issue was spotted on our Cavium ThunderX ARM64 nodes, with MAAS version: 2.2.2 (6099-g8751f91-0ubuntu1~16.04.1)

Steps:
1. Deploy Xenial on this ARM64 node with MaaS web UI
2. Check the BIOS setting to make sure it's booting with PXE
3. When it's been deployed, check the efibootmgr output:
$ sudo efibootmgr
BootCurrent: 0002
Timeout: 10 seconds
BootOrder: 0004,0002,0003,0000,0001
Boot0000* ubuntu
Boot0001 UEFI: Built-in EFI Shell
Boot0002* UEFI: IP4 Ethernet vNIC Controller 62:54:CA
Boot0003* UEFI: IP4 Ethernet vNIC Controller 62:54:CB
Boot0004* UEFI: IP4 Ethernet vNIC Controller 62:54:CC
4. Enable -proposed pocket and upgrade grub2-common and related packages
5. Check efibootmgr again:
$ sudo efibootmgr
BootCurrent: 0002
Timeout: 10 seconds
BootOrder: 0000,0004,0002,0003,0001
Boot0000* ubuntu
Boot0001 UEFI: Built-in EFI Shell
Boot0002* UEFI: IP4 Ethernet vNIC Controller 62:54:CA
Boot0003* UEFI: IP4 Ethernet vNIC Controller 62:54:CB
Boot0004* UEFI: IP4 Ethernet vNIC Controller 62:54:CC

You can see that the BootOrder has changed here.

There is an old bug here: bug 1642298

The upgraded grub package version (was 2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3.12 before the upgrade):
$ dpkg -l | grep grub
ii grub-common 2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3.13 arm64 GRand Unified Bootloader (common files)
ii grub-efi-arm64 2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3.13 arm64 GRand Unified Bootloader, version 2 (ARM64 UEFI version)
ii grub-efi-arm64-bin 2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3.13 arm64 GRand Unified Bootloader, version 2 (ARM64 UEFI binaries)
ii grub-efi-arm64-signed 1.66.13+2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3.13 arm64 GRand Unified Bootloader, version 2 (EFI-ARM64 version, signed)
ii grub2-common 2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3.13 arm64 GRand Unified Bootloader (common files for version 2)

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.04
Package: grub2-common 2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3.13
ProcVersionSignature: User Name 4.4.0-96.119-generic 4.4.83
Uname: Linux 4.4.0-96-generic aarch64
ApportVersion: 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.10
Architecture: arm64
Date: Mon Sep 25 08:45:14 2017
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm-256color
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: grub2
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[dann frazier (dannf)]

Correct - this has not been yet fixed in xenial. However, there are xenial tasks for these issues in LP: #1642298, so let's continue to track it there.

To be clear - the following updates are needed to resolve this issue:

 - You'll need to use MAAS version >= 2.3 - which is currently in ppa:maas/next.
 - grub2 2.02~beta2-36ubuntu3.14 is currently awaiting approval in the upload queue:
     https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/xenial/+queue?queue_state=1
   That needs to lands in xenial-updates before you can deploy xenial guests w/o this issue.