[Bug 1438275] Re: GRUB_RECORDFAIL_TIMEOUT prevents servers from booting

[Tobin Davis]

Maybe instead of 'degrading the experience', you can just document the
change so that people using this OS for testing systems can automate
around it without having to resort to serial port output scanning and
lab wiring contortion.

In our test environment, we often see a MCE that forces the system to
reboot (even with nomce on the kernel cmdline).  This often causes the
system to reboot and sit at grub.  We worked around the issue by adding
this to /etc/default/grub:

GRUB_TERMINAL='console serial"
GRUB_SERIAL_COMMAND="serial --unit=0 --speed=115200 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1"

Then we can monitor and automate the serial console for when grub gets
stuck.  It took a while to figure out the correct grub settings as they
too were undocumented.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1438275

Title:
  GRUB_RECORDFAIL_TIMEOUT prevents servers from booting

Status in grub2 package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid

Bug description:
  On Ubuntu, if there's a power failure or the system is otherwise left
  in a bad state on its last boot, GRUB2 will just hang there
  indefinitely waiting for user input to select the kernel to boot and
  any relevant kernel command-line options. This is annoying since most
  of the test systems are headless so when seeing an unresponsive system
  the server operator have to go attach a HDMI display and USB keyboard
  only to find out there was no serious system error but just the system
  hanging at GRUB for whatever reason at that time.

  Michael Larabel have problems booting his Ubuntu server farm due to it
  GRUB being configured to use GRUB_RECORDFAIL_TIMEOUT.

  According to Michael - Ubuntu seems to be the only major distribution
  though dealing with GRUB_RECORDFAIL_TIMEOUT and causing the issues on
  the failed boot.

  If indeed Ubuntu is the only distribution with this setting, then
  maybe it should be changed?

  http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-Common-
  GRUB2-Issue

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