[Ubuntu 18.04/20.04] Failure to install grub on md-disks.

[Sujith Pandel]

Steps:
1. Setup a DellEMC 14G PE server with 2 Onboard SATA disks.
2. Setup a md-raid (RAID1) on these SATA disks through BIOS S140 controller in UEFI mode.
3. Start installing Ubuntu 18.04 server (debian installer image)
4. Select default values for all prompts and observe the grub failure in the end.

Attaching the screenshot and logs.
Let me know if any more details are required.

Ubuntu 16.04.4 works fine in the same setup.
Hence considering this as a regression.

[Sujith Pandel (sujithpandel)]

Hi @psusi,
Could you please confirm if this is same as bug #1466150?
Reason I am asking this because - we never hit any problems with Ubuntu 16.04 Server installations on the same setup.

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

Yes; the errors in your log are exactly like that one. The one subtle difference I just noticed though is that that was dealing with software raid, but it sounds like you are using bios fakeraid. I would suggest not using the bios fakeraid.

[Sujith Pandel (sujithpandel)]

> I would suggest not using the bios fakeraid.

The DellEMC PowerEdge RAID Controller(PERC) S130/S140 is RAID solution for the DellEMC PowerEdge systems configured through Chipset SATA controller. It does not use any dedicated Hardware for RAID operations. It is set up/configured by the system BIOS. Using the BIOS/UEFI Configuration utility user can configure RAID on onboard SATA/NVMe Drives and install OS and boot from it.

To make use of S130/S140 solution, the user need to change the SATA mode to RAID in BIOS/UEFI Configuration.
During S130/S140 configuration, the VDs (Virtual Disk) are created by system BIOS by writing metadata on the selected onboard SATA or NVMe drives. The metadata format used is MD version 1.2. The resulting VD is a Linux MDRAID VD.

This is the feature that we are working - to get install and boot support for Ubuntu 18.04.
When we did our initial analysis on 16.04, it was working fine (install & boot).
Now this defect is a blocker for this feature.

[Sujith Pandel (sujithpandel)]

This might be the fix?

Handle partition name parsing and formatting for partitioned md
https://github.com/rhboot/efivar/commit/576f55b02d9ec478bd5157352c884e3543bcca58

[Michael Reed (mreed8855)]

I am unable to reproduce this with 18.04.2 (4.15) nor with 18.04.2 hwe in MAAS nor with an iso.

[Jerry Clement (jerry-clement)]

Clarify comment #9. We were mistaken... the issue has been reproduced and continues today.

[Sujith Pandel (sujithpandel)]

This issue is seen with debian installer based 20.04
https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-legacy-server/releases/20.04/release/ubuntu-20.04.1-legacy-server-amd64.iso

Also, we feel it may be present with 20.04 subiquity based installer images also.
However, we are blocked with https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1961079 to verify the same.
Please help fix the issue in 18.04 and 20.04