pleroma.debian.social

It appears that the current Ubuntu 24.04 grub package cannot handle being installed with BIOS booting on software RAID. When any grub upgrade happens, it errors out in grub's postinstall actions, apparently because it is trying to grub-install on /dev/mdX and grub-install doesn't like that. debconf-show says grub-pc selections look the same as on 22.04 so who knows.

@cks Kind of glad you offhand mentioned that because making my boot disk be raid 1 on my old (non-EFI) server box was on my long list of things-to-do ... now I think maybe I'll just put that off for a bit.

@acsawdey It works fine in prior versions and 24.04 isn't even officially in beta (although it was supposed to be beta last week, thanks xz backdoor). I assume that Canonical broke something in a package change.

I filed the 24.04 pre-beta grub update + software RAID + BIOS MBR issue as https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2060695
Despite the installer setting up everything exactly the same as on 22.04, this is apparently thought to be an installer bug instead of a grub bug. Will Ubuntu fix it before release? Honestly I doubt it given they view it as an installer bug. If it's unfixed, we won't be installing 24.04 any time soon.

@cks Makes me glad to have pushed all our systems to use UEFI booting. Used that as an excuse to retire our last servers that were too old to do UEFI.

@oclsc It's possible that UEFI is also broken; I just haven't tested it because I'm testing in a BIOS MBR only virtualization environment.

I think our 24.04 grub package update problems exist because in 20.04 and 22.04, grub simply didn't run grub-install on package updates (for what is sort of this reason, https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1889556 ). The solution to this Ubuntu mess is unclear.

@cks i have so much trouble with grub on debian too, and exactly that kind of problems: sometimes, even on install, grub wouldn't get installed properly and we have a procedure on install to check that it's configured properly. grub is kept out of automated upgrades because we've been bit by bad upgrades in the past too before

@cks surely "booting" should be a fixed issue after almost a century of computing at this point

@highvoltage elsewhere in the thread, @cks explains a bug was filed and another found