Folks, Please consider the following two patches for inclusion in the anaconda and pykickstart sources. The patches provide three features, described below, related to hard drive installations. Together these features enable a kickstart and/or an exploded tree installation image to be placed on a portable storage device, such as a USB flash memory or hard drive device, and the device to be used to install one or more systems with unknown hard drive configuration. In effect, with this patch, installing from a portable storage device has the same ease of use characteristics as installing from a CD, with the added benefit that kickstart and install files can be modified directly on the device as needed, without the overhead of creating new iso images and burning CDs. The anaconda patch was created using version 11.2.0.9 of the sources. The pykickstart patch was created using version 0.36. We can provide an updated patches against the most current versions, if helpful. Given the rate at which sources are changing, we decided to hold off until someone in anaconda has had a chance to review the proposed patches and suggest changes, if needed. DOWNLOAD PATCHES ---------------- * The anaconda version 11.2.0.9 patch can be downloaded from http://www.abodiosoftware.com/patches/anaconda-11.2.0.9_abodio.patch * The pykickstart version 0.36 patch can be downloaded from http://www.abodiosoftware.com/patches/pykickstart-0.36_abodio.patch PATCH FEATURES -------------- 1. Partition auto-detection. The patch allows the partition to be left unspecified when using the harddrive method for kickstart and install locations, and the item (kickstart or installtree) to be located by iterating through available partitions. Specifically, the kickstart and method options can now be specified as follows on the command line (note the empty partition section between the two colons): ks=hd::/path/to/ks.cfg, and method=hd::/path/to/install/files Within the kickstart file, a hard drive install can be specified as follows (note the lack of a --partition directive): harddrive --dir=/path/to/install/files 2. Exploded tree support. The patch enables harddrive installation from an exploded tree, analogous to NFS installations. As a side effect, it also provides support for a RHupdates folder for an exploded tree installation. 3. Device modification protection. By default, the patch removes partitions on the harddrive containing the kickstart and/or install iso/tree from the default set to be formatted/partitioned. This can be overridden manually within the installer UI or by kickstart. Likewise, the install/kickstart harddrive is removed as a candidate for boot record modifications. This can similarly be overridden by kickstart. IMPLEMENTATION DETAILS ---------------------- 1. Partition auto-detection Previously, loader.c called the setMethodFromCmdLine()function as soon as the "method=" argument was seen. This can't be done anymore because now the partition might not be specified, and loader will (incorrectly) identify the /path/to/install/files as the partition. To get around this, we have added a new variable -- methodFromCmdLine -- to the loaderData struct. This variable is initialized while parsing command line arguments upon seeing the "method=" argument. After the SCSI, IDE and the DASD hardware have been initialize, the setMethodFromCmdLine() function is called. A race condition was seen here, by virtue of which the setMethodFromCmdLine() function was called before all the USB devices had been recognized. To get around this, the sleep() function was used to sleep for 5 seconds. If setMethodFromCmdLine() was called without the USB devices recognized, the getPartitionsList() (used by the findPartitionsWithFile() function, described later on) function would not return a complete list of devices. If, in the case of an hd install, the partition isn't specified, the findPartitionWithFile() function is called with the supplied directory name as a parameter. This function retrieves the list of available partitions and walks through them looking for the full path to the directory on each of the partitions. It accepts two parameters: the first is the pointer to the device string (populated by this function) and the second is the file to look for on all attached devices. This function returns the first partition it finds that contains the requested directory. This implementation was chosen because it similar to the case when the "ks=" argument is encountered while parsing the command line arguments. Similarly, with this patch, the user is no longer required to specify the partition of the ks file. In this case, like before, if the partition is not specified, the findPartitionWithFile() function is called with "/path/to/ks.cfg" as a parameter, and the partition containing the path is used from then on. The ks partition is passed along to the python stage of anaconda by the --kspartition option, which is added to the anaconda language. The ks partition is also saved in the loaderData struct. Pykickstart raises an exception when neither or both of biospart and partition options are specified with the harddrive command. Since the --partition is no longer required, pykickstart was modified to not raise an exception anymore. 2. Exploded tree support To support exploded tree harddrive installation, we mount the harddrive specified by the "method=" option to /tmp/hdimage and try to find the path to a valid ISO image (one that contains a stage2.img). If a valid ISO image is found, it is mounted to /mnt/source and the URL passed to anaconda is hdiso://[dev]/[path]@/mnt/source If no such path is found, we check to see if if /tmp/hdimage contains a valid exploded tree by looking for the stage2.img in the /tmp/hdimage/images folder. In this case, the tree itself is mounted to /mnt/source and the URL passed along to the next stage is hd://[dev]/[path]@/mnt/source. This way, we know which partition is the source partition as well as the path to the relevant install files. The above approach is modeled closely after the behavior of anaconda for NFS installations, where /mnt/source is used as the "base" installation directory. In the python stage of anaconda, the HardDriveInstallMethod class is replaced by two classes HdInstallMethod and HdIsoInstallMethod, analogous to the NfsInstallMethod and NfsIsoInstallMethod classes. HdInstallMethod is identical to NfsInstallMethod except for the URL parsing logic. HdIsoInstallMethod, on the other hand, extends both HdInstallMethod and NfsIsoInstallMethod so that there is minimal code redundancy. 3. Device modification protection The anaconda.id.diskset contains a list of blacklisted devices that should not be used by default by the anaconda partitioner; this list includes both the ks and source devices. Methods returning the ks and source devices are also added to the DiskSet class. A compareDrives() function is added to DiskSet that extends the functionality of isys.compareDrives() by adding in a check against the blacklisted devices. If one of the two devices appears on the blacklist, then this device is considered 'smaller' in comparison to the other. If, on the other hand, the devices are jointly present or absent from the blacklist, then the standard isys.compareDrives() function is called to compute the return value. All references to isys.compareDrives() have thus been replaced with anaconda.id.diskset.compareDrives() in order to comply with the necessary changes in this patch. In the bootloaderSetupChoices() function, when the updateDriveList() method is called, a sorted list (using the DiskSet.compareDrives() method) is passed along as well. This ensures that none of the blacklisted devices are set as the primary boot device. CHANGES NOT AFFECTING BEHAVIOR ------------------------------ The mountHardDrive() function is now a state machine similar to all the other install methods' "mounting functions." TEST CASES ---------- The following tests were performed with the aforementioned changes. Each install method was tested with and without specifying the partition of the kickstart file and source files independently. Tests were performed by installing Fedora 6 on an i386 machine. The version of booty used for testing was 0.82 and the version of pykickstart used was 0.36. All tests passed (both text and graphical installations): --------------------------------------------------------- |Install Type | KS | METHOD | | --------------------------------------------- | |w/ dev|w/o dev|remote|w/ dev|w/o dev|remote| |---------------------------------------------------------- | HDISO | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | | HD | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | | NFSISO | Y | Y | Y | N/A | N/A | N/A | | NFS | Y | Y | Y | N/A | N/A | N/A | | HTTP | Y | Y | Y | N/A | N/A | N/A | --------------------------------------------------------- Fedora Core 6 comes with Anaconda Version 11.1.1.3-1, so I put the files modified between versions 11.1.1.3-1 and 11.2.0.9 in the RHupdates directory, and placed it at the same level as the Fedora directory in the exploded tree. This way I also verified that the RHupdates directory is used during the installation. For ISO installations, I created an updates.img and placed it one level up from the ISO files. BUGS ---- We are not aware of any bugs at this time. However, any bugs should be reported to me - Uday Prakash - by email to uprakash@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
