canonical-ubuntu-qa team mailing list archive

[Stefan Bader <2116165@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Unfortunately I have a feeling that getting zipl to change might be
rather slim. If my memory serves the way it boots is rather related to
lilo in the sense that running the loader will update a list of disk
records to read than understanding any filesystem and using filenames
flexible at boot.

Having the dist-upgrade done first, even with the downside of not being
the solution in all cases, at least feels like a natural match on how I
would approach tests. Start from an up-to-date base and then bring in
the proposed changes. Maybe even with a anal reboot in between upgrade
and trigger install to rule out issues which are caused by something
else.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2116165

Title:
  Failing to boot requested kernel on s390x

Status in autopkgtest package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged
Status in s390-tools package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  This problem is exposed by a combination of conditions:
  - For s390x arch (because of bootloader used (zipl))
  - Attempting to test an HWE kernel (version > initially released version)
  - Deployment start based on a LTS server image using the GA (initially
    released) kernel

  The special way zipl works is that it only maintains the most recently
  installed kernel as the one to use by default on next boot and the
  kernel used before as the alternative fallback. So the order of
  installing kernels matters.

  Deployment of ADT test environments seem to start based on an image that uses the initially released kernel (GA kernel). This is done by selecting the linux-generic meta. The next step seems to be to install the packages for which testing was requested (triggers). When we try to test the HWE kernel this might install a version of the kernel which is higher than the base image kernel. When this step completes the HWE kernel is the most recently installed one and the GA kernel is the previously installed one. At this point a reboot would come up with the kernel to test.
  Following the trigger installation however there is a dist-upgrade run for the deployed system. And quite often there is an updated GA kernel available as well. Which then becomes the most-recently installed one and rebooting after this comes up with the GA kernel and not the HWE kernel requested by the trigger.

  This causes the test run to be matched against the wrong kernel and
  the HWE kernel reports testing to be missing.

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