Andres, fundamentally the problem is that EFI provides no means to control the boot order via IPMI; it's set via non-IPMI firmware mechanisms or via the efibootmgr tool in Ubuntu. That is, point #4 in your first list is incorrect, and everything falls apart after that. When a GRUB package uses efibootmgr to set GRUB as the default boot option, the configuration to PXE-boot first is overridden and MAAS loses control of the computer's boot process. Although I, the original reporter, am on the server certification team, this isn't a certification issue per se; it affects ANYBODY who uses MAAS to regularly redeploy nodes. Larry Michel, then on the OIL team, noted that it affects OIL in comment #3. Sooner or later, customers will be affected by this, too.
You can view this as a problem with EFI and/or how IPMI interacts with EFI if you like, but that won't resolve the problem. Like it or not, the industry is moving to EFI, and my understanding is that the big players in this realm aren't interested in providing a way for IPMI to set the boot order on EFI-based systems. Even if they did, at this late date there'd still be a large installed base of computers that wouldn't work with any mechanism that might be developed. What we (Canonical) CAN control is how and when we use efibootmgr to adjust the boot order. This is PARTLY a GRUB packaging issue, but we need some way to tell that package whether or not to set itself as the default boot option. Blake, Ryan, and Dann are discussing ways to use debconf variables to tell the GRUB package what to do, and if I'm understanding correctly, MAAS will have to set such a variable in a preseed file to produce results that keep nodes controllable by MAAS. Of course, once a node is deployed, its owner could log in and mess things up. There's not much we can do about that, but at least we can ensure that our own tools and procedures don't mess things up. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1642298 Title: UEFI Xenial install sets computer to boot from hard disk To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/curtin/+bug/1642298/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
