On 2014-02-01, at 19:57, Patrick J. LoPresti <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> If you try to install Scientific Linux 5.10 x86_64 with "bootloader
> mbr", you will find it crashes during the "installing bootloader"
> phase.

Confirmed. But it only happens when you enable the fastbugs repo when installing. That's where grub-0.97-13.11.el5_10.1.x86_64.rpm is from. The package released with 5.10 is ok.

> This is because /sbin/grub from the grub package is dynamically
> linked against non-existent libraries.
> 
> Doing "chroot /mnt/sysimage" and then "/sbin/grub" by hand results in:
> 
>  bash: /sbin/grub: /usr/lib/libc.so.1: bad ELF interpreter: No such
> file or directory

It's a bit more complicated. When my ks installation reaches %post, /sbin/grub in the chroot environment works fine. But anaconda still crashes. Seems like it uses the installed grub from outside the chroot. No clue why they don't use the (static) /usr/sbin/grub in the initrd.

Anyway, replacing the fastbugs package should fix this.

When checking for this issue, I found a problem ("feature"?) with the initrd: Previous versions came with sshd and ssh-keygen, which we used to set up ssh access in %pre. But both are no longer available in the 5.10 installation environment. Is this on purpose?

	Stephan

> If you manually run "rpm2cpio grub-0.97-13.11.el5_10.1.x86_64.rpm |
> cpio -id", then "file sbin/grub", it says:
> 
>  sbin/grub: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV),
> dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.9, stripped
> 
> This is clearly wrong; grub is supposed to be statically linked, not
> dynamically linked. (If you do the same rpm2cpio + file sequence on
> the grub package from SL 5.9 or earlier, you will see that it is
> statically linked.)
> 
> This appears to be an instance of the following bug:
> 
>  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=246827
> 
> Summary of the bug: If you build the grub SRPM on an x86_64 system
> with the i386 ncurses-devel package installed, you wind up with a
> dynamically-linked grub that requires the non-existent
> /usr/lib/libc.so.1. It looks to me like SL 5.10 was built on such a
> system, while earlier 5.x versions were not.
> 
> - Pat

-- 
Stephan Wiesand
DESY - DV -
Platanenallee 6
15738 Zeuthen, Germany