Bug#879106: debian-installer-utils: "list-devices disk" should consider persistent memory block devices

[Ard Biesheuvel]

Package: debian-installer-utils
Version: 1.119
Severity: normal
Tags: d-i

Dear Maintainer,

When booting an .iso image via HTTP boot from UEFI, the .iso image will
be exposed to the OS as a ramdisk via the ACPI NFIT table, and will be
picked up by the existing NFIT code in the kernel, which will expose it
as a /dev/pmemXXX device.

For example,

# blkid
/dev/pmem0: UUID="2017-10-17-14-41-11-00" LABEL="ISOIMAGE" TYPE="iso9660"

Currently, debian-installer will fail to find this block device, and
complain that the installer media cannot be found.

Please add support for pmemXXX block device nodes to list-devices so
that they may be found automatically when using HTTP boot to install.
--
Ard.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.1
APT prefers stable
APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: arm64 (aarch64)

Kernel: Linux 4.14.0-rc4-00014-g981584ed1827 (SMP w/24 CPU cores; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US:en (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

[Emanuele Rocca]

Hi Ard,

Post by Ard Biesheuvel
When booting an .iso image via HTTP boot from UEFI, the .iso image will
be exposed to the OS as a ramdisk via the ACPI NFIT table, and will be
picked up by the existing NFIT code in the kernel, which will expose it
as a /dev/pmemXXX device.
For example,
# blkid
/dev/pmem0: UUID="2017-10-17-14-41-11-00" LABEL="ISOIMAGE" TYPE="iso9660"
Currently, debian-installer will fail to find this block device, and
complain that the installer media cannot be found.
Please add support for pmemXXX block device nodes to list-devices so
that they may be found automatically when using HTTP boot to install.

Fix proposed here:
https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/debian-installer-utils/-/merge_requests/14

Note that for the pmem devices to work in the installer we also need to
add the relevant kernel modules to the kernel-image udeb:
https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/linux/-/merge_requests/1167

ema