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Deb10 installer can't install grub

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  Deb10 installer can't install grub Dave Sherohman <dave@sherohman.org> - 2021-03-02 13:30 +0100
    Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> - 2021-03-02 14:00 +0100
      Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub The Wanderer <wanderer@fastmail.fm> - 2021-03-02 14:30 +0100
        Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> - 2021-03-02 16:00 +0100
          Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub The Wanderer <wanderer@fastmail.fm> - 2021-03-02 16:00 +0100
          Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub Charles Curley <charlescurley@charlescurley.com> - 2021-03-02 17:20 +0100
      Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub Dave Sherohman <dave@sherohman.org> - 2021-03-02 15:10 +0100
        Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub The Wanderer <wanderer@fastmail.fm> - 2021-03-02 15:20 +0100
          Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub The Wanderer <wanderer@fastmail.fm> - 2021-03-02 15:30 +0100
            Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub Dave Sherohman <dave@sherohman.org> - 2021-03-02 15:40 +0100
          Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub Dave Sherohman <dave@sherohman.org> - 2021-03-02 15:30 +0100
      Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub Felix Miata <mrmazda@earthlink.net> - 2021-03-02 20:10 +0100
        Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub Andrei POPESCU <andreimpopescu@gmail.com> - 2021-03-03 17:00 +0100
          Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub Felix Miata <mrmazda@earthlink.net> - 2021-03-03 23:20 +0100
            Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> - 2021-03-03 23:50 +0100
              Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2021-03-04 10:10 +0100
                Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> - 2021-03-04 14:20 +0100
                  Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2021-03-04 14:30 +0100
                  Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub Anssi Saari <as@sci.fi> - 2021-03-05 10:30 +0100
                    Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub Darac Marjal <mailinglist@darac.org.uk> - 2021-03-05 11:10 +0100
                      Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub Andy Smith <andy@strugglers.net> - 2021-03-05 13:00 +0100
            Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2021-03-04 10:10 +0100
            Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub Andrei POPESCU <andreimpopescu@gmail.com> - 2021-03-05 14:50 +0100
    Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub "Andrew M.A. Cater" <amacater@einval.com> - 2021-03-02 22:00 +0100
    Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub Dave Sherohman <dave@sherohman.org> - 2021-03-03 10:00 +0100
      SOLVED - Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub Dave Sherohman <dave@sherohman.org> - 2021-03-03 12:30 +0100
        Re: SOLVED - Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub Marc Auslander <marcausl@gmail.com> - 2021-03-03 16:50 +0100
          Re: SOLVED - Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub Dave Sherohman <dave@sherohman.org> - 2021-03-07 14:10 +0100
            Re: SOLVED - Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub Nicholas Geovanis <nickgeovanis@gmail.com> - 2021-03-07 15:10 +0100
      Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub Anssi Saari <as@sci.fi> - 2021-03-04 10:10 +0100

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#232397

Hello,

On Fri, Mar 05, 2021 at 10:04:34AM +0000, Darac Marjal wrote:
> So, if your file is small, then yes, you won't see any performance
> benefit. But if your file is larger than a block, or if you want
> to access more than one file at once, then RAID can read the
> second block from a different drive.

However, Linux MD RAID-1 will only ever achieve the read performance
of a single device per thread, so in order to get the read
performance benefit of multiple copies you either need to use
multiple reading threads / processes or else use RAID-10 instead.

    https://www.spinics.net/lists/raid/msg47240.html

ZFS does not suffer from this.

Cheers,
Andy

-- 
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

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#232342

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On Wed, Mar 03, 2021 at 05:16:14PM -0500, Felix Miata wrote:
> Andrei POPESCU composed on 2021-03-03 17:50 (UTC+0200):
> 
> > Felix Miata wrote:
> 
> >> To start with, RAID1 is marginally slower than ordinary filesystems on partitions.
> 
> > This is true for some workloads, for others it can be significantly 
> > faster.
> 
> > https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/understanding-raid-how-performance-scales-from-one-disk-to-eight/
> 										
> [...] Do
> you know of, or can you provide a reference to, any way RAID1 performance can be
> better than single disk?

I can just provide a hint: when accessing mirrored disks, reading is
done whenever the first disk finishes; writing whenever both disks
are done. So reading is potentially faster, writing potentially
slower.

That's about latency. The throughput shouldn't change too much (unless
you're combining very different disks, but that'd be asking for it).

Compose this with several layers of buffering and I doubt you'll be
able to make out any significant difference though.

No experimental data to back this up, alas.

> Evolution as taught in public schools, like religion,
> 	is based on faith, not on science.

OK. Now all bets wrt RAID are off, anyway.

Cheers
 - t

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#232400

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On Mi, 03 mar 21, 17:16:14, Felix Miata wrote:
> Andrei POPESCU composed on 2021-03-03 17:50 (UTC+0200):
> 
> > Felix Miata wrote:
> 
> >> To start with, RAID1 is marginally slower than ordinary filesystems on partitions.
> 
> > This is true for some workloads, for others it can be significantly 
> > faster.
> 
> > https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/understanding-raid-how-performance-scales-from-one-disk-to-eight/
> 										
> I wrote not RAID, but RAID1, very purposely. I found no mention of RAID1 in any of
> the graphs there, and the subject of RAID1 barely touched, basically describing
> its purely mirror topology and little else.

Quote from the article:

    In our performance charts, we show a line from two disks through 
    eight disks for RAID10. The first datapoint, for two disks, is 
    obviously a simple RAID1. The datapoints for four, six, and eight 
    disks are RAID10. We draw a line through all points for ease of 
    interpretation—but there is no three, five, or seven disk RAID10 in 
    the actual data, for hopefully obvious reasons.


Kind regards,
Andrei
-- 
http://wiki.debian.org/FAQsFromDebianUser

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#232280

On Tue, Mar 02, 2021 at 05:57:37AM -0600, Dave Sherohman wrote:
> I've got a new server and am currently fighting with the Debian 10
> installer (build 20190702) in my attempts to get it up and running.
> After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I managed to get it to stop
> complaining about being unble to mount /boot/efi and complete the
> "Partition disks" step successfully, but now I'm completely stuck on the
> "Install GRUB" step.
> 
> The GUI installer shows the error:
> 
> Unable to install GRUB in dummy
> Executing 'grub-install dummy' failed.
> 
> Checking the syslog output on virtual console 4 shows a bunch of
> os-prober activity (as expected), then finally:
> 
> Installing for x64_64-efi platform.
> grub-install: error: failed to get canonical path of `/dev/nvme0n1p1`.
> error: Running 'grub-install  --force "dummy"' failed.

Check the settings for the disk in BIOS equivalent - I had lots of problems
with an HP because I'd inadvertently told the HP software to take over
partitioning of the disks and put them into an array. 

Andy C.

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#232301

General update on my situation:

Just before knocking off for the day, I tried telling the installer to
finish up without installing a boot loader, then used the netinst USB
stick as a rescue disk to boot my installed system.  From there, I was
able to use the regular grub-install program (instead of the install
environment's grub-installer script).

grub-install ran with no errors and I now have grub in the (separate,
non-RAIDed) EFI partitions of both nvme drives... but it's still not
directly bootable.  Trying to boot directly from nvme drops me into a
grub command line.

Thinking that this may be an initrd or similar issue, I tried
reinstalling the kernel image and grub-efi-amd64 packages, so that their
postinst scripts would run and rebuild initrd and reinstall grub to the
drives, but that had no effect.  Still just getting the grub shell when
I boot from nvme.

Any tips on making use of the grub shell to make further progress, such
as getting the system to boot in non-rescue mode (i.e., not chrooted
from the installer)?  The help information available in the grub shell
itself isn't terribly useful because it scrolls off the screen with no
(obvious) pager or scrollback buffer.

Alternately, suggestions for things I can try in the chroot environment
would also be good, since that's considerably less restrictive than the
installer environment I was trying to work within yesterday.


I guess the most obvious explanation for the current grub issues is that
grub isn't smart enough to boot an mdadm filesystem directly and I need
to repartition with a non-RAID /boot, but I don't consider that a
desirable solution, since it would then leave me with no /boot if the
device holding that partition dies.


(No new text below this point, just my original post for context.)

On Tue, Mar 02, 2021 at 05:57:37AM -0600, Dave Sherohman wrote:
> I've got a new server and am currently fighting with the Debian 10
> installer (build 20190702) in my attempts to get it up and running.
> After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I managed to get it to stop
> complaining about being unble to mount /boot/efi and complete the
> "Partition disks" step successfully, but now I'm completely stuck on the
> "Install GRUB" step.
> 
> The GUI installer shows the error:
> 
> Unable to install GRUB in dummy
> Executing 'grub-install dummy' failed.
> 
> Checking the syslog output on virtual console 4 shows a bunch of
> os-prober activity (as expected), then finally:
> 
> Installing for x64_64-efi platform.
> grub-install: error: failed to get canonical path of `/dev/nvme0n1p1`.
> error: Running 'grub-install  --force "dummy"' failed.
> 
> I assume that the "canonical path" it's looking for is a /dev/sda-type
> device name, but I have no idea how to assign one of those to an nvme
> drive.  (And I thought that kind of name was supposed to have been
> banished in favor of "predictable" names by now anyhow.)
> 
> Several of the old-style names are already in use; the installer is
> showing sda for the USB stick that the installation was booted from and
> sdb-sdi for eight large disks, but the operating system is to boot and
> run from the drives /dev/nvme0n1 and /dev/nvme1n1.
> 
> What do I need to do to get this working?
> 
> Also, would that solution also work for md devices as well as for nvme
> devices?  I had previously tried putting UEFI onto a RAID1 mirror
> between the two nvme drives, but got a similar error from grub about not
> being able to find the canonical path of /dev/md1.
> 
> -- 
> Dave Sherohman
> 


-- 
Dave Sherohman

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#232306 — SOLVED - Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub

So, after my last message, I ran across a general mdadm setup guide at
https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Setting_up_a_(new)_system
and, in the "booting" section of that document, it said to add
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="domdadm"
to /etc/default/grub.  Didn't have that, so I added it, did the checks
mentioned in the document, and reinstalled grub to both EFI partitions.

Still didn't work.

Then I found https://linoxide.com/linux-how-to/grub-rescue-commands/ and
was able to start the installed kernel with the command sequence:

set root=(md/1)
linux (md/1)/vmlinuz root=/dev/md1
initrd (md/1)/boot/initrd.img-4.19.0-14-amd64
insmod normal
boot

This still ultimately died with an error saying the EFI partition had an
"Invalid FSINFO signature".  Searches on that phrase mostly seemed to
talk about secure boot problems, so I double-checked the bios options
and secure boot was off, so that wasn't it.

So I went back to the linoxide.com document and went through all the
steps that I hadn't already done manually:  Running os-prober and
update-grub.  Then grub-install to the EFI partitions again, reboot,
and... success!


Based on this, I'm guessing that the original problem was that the
installer forgot to include mdadm support in its grub options, even
though it was configured with an mdadm boot device.  And then I missed a
couple steps after adding mdadm support, so it didn't all get installed
to the EFI partitions correctly.

-- 
Dave Sherohman

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#232315 — Re: SOLVED - Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub

On 3/3/2021 6:30 AM, Dave Sherohman wrote:

> 
> Based on this, I'm guessing that the original problem was that the
> installer forgot to include mdadm support in its grub options, even
> though it was configured with an mdadm boot device.  And then I missed a
> couple steps after adding mdadm support, so it didn't all get installed
> to the EFI partitions correctly.
> 

One potential gotcha.  When you boot from an mdadm file system 
containing /boot/grub, grub will not write to the file system.  In 
particular, it will not update grub/grubenv even if you have a save_env 
line in grub.cfg.  So if you use grub-reboot to specify an alternate 
line in grub.cfg, you need to reset grubenv afterwards.  I do this in a 
root @reboot cron job.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, you probably don't need to 
worry about this.

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#232480 — Re: SOLVED - Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub

On Wed, Mar 03, 2021 at 10:28:34AM -0500, Marc Auslander wrote:
> One potential gotcha.  When you boot from an mdadm file system containing
> /boot/grub, grub will not write to the file system.  In particular, it will
> not update grub/grubenv even if you have a save_env line in grub.cfg.  So if
> you use grub-reboot to specify an alternate line in grub.cfg, you need to
> reset grubenv afterwards.  I do this in a root @reboot cron job.
> 
> If you don't know what I'm talking about, you probably don't need to worry
> about this.

I don't *know* know what you're talking about, but I think I get the
gist of it.  I'm not doing anything fancy enough to have to deal with
the details of grubenv and grub-reboot, but your initial comment about
grub refusing to write to a mdadm filesystem is consistent with what I
was seeing, and it's nice to have confirmation that it actually does
work that way.

-- 
Dave Sherohman

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#232482 — Re: SOLVED - Re: Deb10 installer can't install grub

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On Sun, Mar 7, 2021 at 7:03 AM Dave Sherohman <dave@sherohman.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 03, 2021 at 10:28:34AM -0500, Marc Auslander wrote:
> > One potential gotcha.  When you boot from an mdadm file system containing
> > /boot/grub, grub will not write to the file system.  In particular, it
> will
> > not update grub/grubenv even if you have a save_env line in grub.cfg.
> So if
> > you use grub-reboot to specify an alternate line in grub.cfg, you need to
> > reset grubenv afterwards.  I do this in a root @reboot cron job.
> >
> > If you don't know what I'm talking about, you probably don't need to
> worry
> > about this.
>
> I don't *know* know what you're talking about, but I think I get the
> gist of it.  I'm not doing anything fancy enough to have to deal with
> the details of grubenv and grub-reboot, but your initial comment about
> grub refusing to write to a mdadm filesystem is consistent with what I
> was seeing, and it's nice to have confirmation that it actually does
> work that way.
>

Dave the issues you describe dealing with mdadm setup, well that's why I
eventually
just switched to LVM-based mirroring and striping. Early on, LVM wasn't
supported as a boot
volume, but the original code base had supported that on HP-UX and AIX. So
years ago now,
that restriction was lifted. Another mdadm issue is just the use of it in a
kind of
"oral tradition": it's not that setup is hard, it just still seems like
magic spells after all this time.

-- 
> Dave Sherohman
>
>

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#232344

Dave Sherohman <dave@sherohman.org> writes:

> Any tips on making use of the grub shell to make further progress, such
> as getting the system to boot in non-rescue mode (i.e., not chrooted
> from the installer)?  The help information available in the grub shell
> itself isn't terribly useful because it scrolls off the screen with no
> (obvious) pager or scrollback buffer.

There is a pager in Grub but it really isn't obvious. For the future
it's enabled by set pager=1. Why it's not on by default I don't know...

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