Hello Thomas,

you will have noticed that systemd 255 moves its files from / to /usr.
This includes /sbin/init.

Now a problem arises, when:
- I use a basefile tar.gz, made with an old systemd (say, it uses
  testing as of today)
- During baseupdate, systemd gets updated and moves its file (say, I'm
  actually installing unstable)

What happens is this:
- base image gets unpacked, /sbin is a symlink to /usr/sbin,
  /sbin/init is actually /usr/sbin/init
- baseupdate diverts /sbin/init to /sbin/init.distrib (and using
  symlinks, /usr/sbin/init became /usr/sbin/init.distrib)
- baseupdate updates systemd, dpkg 'moves' /sbin/init to /usr/sbin/init,
  but the divert stays in place for /sbin/init.
  At this time, dpkg will have overwritten /usr/sbin/init with the new
  file(!)
- fai-divert -R runs, removes /sbin/init, and removes the divert of
  /sbin/init.
  But: at this point /sbin/init was already the new /usr/sbin/init,
  which is now lost.

As a result /usr/sbin/init is missing, and the system does not boot.

I would suggest dropping all the fai-divert calls in baseupdate.

Chris

Hi Chris,

    > Now a problem arises, when:
    > - I use a basefile tar.gz, made with an old systemd (say, it uses
    >   testing as of today)
    > - During baseupdate, systemd gets updated and moves its file (say, I'm
    >   actually installing unstable)
Mmm, I do not know if it's possible to catch this.
Using an old system which is then updated may always cause strange
problems.

Does this problem also arises when you use a basefile from unstable?
This is the main question I have.

fai-client 5.11? I do not know this version. I guess it's some
other version.

* Chris Hofstaedtler [Fri Nov 17, 2023 at 08:54:29PM +0100]:

Thanks for the great analysis, Chris.

It seems that
https://github.com/faiproject/fai/commit/7294b415ab2982f84b293900a9610eab49184201
works around the issue, at least for my use case (though the commit
message sadly isn't really verbose and doesn't say what the
underlying reason for the change was).

The change didn't make it into any fai release yet, though.

regards
-mika-

* Thomas Lange <lange@cs.uni-koeln.de> [231117 23:50]:


No, because then there is no systemd-sysv upgrade happening as part
of updatebase. But then updatebase is kinda supposed to handle
exactly such things, no?

I can't say what the version we saw this originally really is, but
it reproduces on 6.0.5.

Best,
Chris

Hi Mika,

the additional test before calling fai-divert was added because in
the next FAI release, we will move from sysv to systemd by default.

I think I will not drop the code for sysv support immediately.

Hi Mika,

the additional test before calling fai-divert was added because in
the next FAI release, we will move from sysv to systemd by default.

I think I will not drop the code for sysv support immediately.

The comment in lib/updatebase explains why the diversion for
/sbin/init was added:

    # if libc is upgraded init u is called in chroot environment and
    # then init will eat up much cpu time

This was a rare case in the past and maybe we can remove this
diversion? What do you think?

The comment in lib/updatebase explains why the diversion for
/sbin/init was added:

    # if libc is upgraded init u is called in chroot environment and
    # then init will eat up much cpu time

This was a rare case in the past and maybe we can remove this
diversion? What do you think?

Hi,

This bug also broke the generation of Vagrant images for the testing
distribution. (Those images are based on a fork of
https://salsa.debian.org/cloud-team/debian-cloud-images)

I removed the divert locally as a workaround.

Lucas

We believe that the bug you reported is fixed in the latest version of
fai, which is due to be installed in the Debian FTP archive.

A summary of the changes between this version and the previous one is
attached.

Thank you for reporting the bug, which will now be closed.  If you
have further comments please address them to 1056151@bugs.debian.org,
and the maintainer will reopen the bug report if appropriate.

Debian distribution maintenance software
pp.
Thomas Lange <lange@debian.org> (supplier of updated fai package)

(This message was generated automatically at their request; if you
believe that there is a problem with it please contact the archive
administrators by mailing ftpmaster@ftp-master.debian.org)
Format: 1.8
Date: Thu, 29 Feb 2024 11:34:09 +0100
Source: fai
Architecture: source
Version: 6.2.2
Distribution: unstable
Urgency: low
Maintainer: Thomas Lange <lange@debian.org>
Changed-By: Thomas Lange <lange@debian.org>
Closes: 1056151
Changes:
 fai (6.2.2) unstable; urgency=low
 .
   * updatebase: do not divert /sbin/init, Closes: #1056151
   * subroutines: fix variable name
   * 10-base-classes: remove class LINUX
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