[Bug 1891718] Re: [Regression] breaks GRUB install on an nvme device

[Robie Basak]

Hi dann,

It looks like there's quite a bit of refactoring going on in the
patchset you backported. Would it be feasible to write a smaller fix
just for the problem being fixed instead, or is this no practical?

>From SRU policy:

"""We never assume that any change, no matter how obvious, is completely
free of regression risk.

In line with this, the requirements for stable updates are not necessarily the same as those in the development release. When preparing future releases, one of our goals is to construct the most elegant and maintainable system possible, and this often involves fundamental improvements to the system's architecture, rearranging packages to avoid bundled copies of other software so that we only have to maintain it in one place, and so on. However, once we have completed a release, the priority is normally to minimise risk caused by changes not explicitly required to fix qualifying bugs, and this tends to be well-correlated with minimising the size of those changes. As such, the same bug may need to be fixed in different ways in stable and development releases. 
"""

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1891718

Title:
  [Regression] breaks GRUB install on an nvme device

Status in Efivar:
  New
Status in efivar package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in efivar source package in Focal:
  In Progress
Status in efivar source package in Groovy:
  Fix Released

Bug description:
  [Impact]
  Grub fails to install on systems with nvme-subsys storage when installing focal, or upgrading from bionic to focal. As symptom of the latter is shown below:

  ┌───────────────────────┤ Configuring shim-signed ├────────────────────────┐
    │                                                                          │
    │ GRUB failed to install to the following devices:                         │
    │                                                                          │
    │ /dev/nvme0n1p1                                                           │
    │                                                                          │
    │ Do you want to continue anyway? If you do, your computer may not start   │
    │ up properly.                                                             │
    │                                                                          │
    │ Writing GRUB to boot device failed - continue?                           │
    │                                                                          │
    │                    <Yes>                       <No>

  [Test Case]
  On a system with an EFI System Partition residing on an nvme-subsys block device, run grub-install:

  $ sudo /usr/sbin/grub-install
  Installing for x86_64-efi platform.
  /usr/sbin/grub-install: warning: Internal error.
  /usr/sbin/grub-install: error: failed to register the EFI boot entry: Operation not permitted.

  Also, regression test on a system with a non-nvme-subsys NVMe device.

  [Regression Potential]
  There's a risk that a parsing bug will introduce a regression to other systems - most at risk are systems with NVMe block devices. Supposedly nvme-fabrics systems were not previously supported and, as a side-effect of this backport, will now be. However, it's possible - like was the case with bionic/nvme-subsys - that nvme-fabrics *used* to happen to work, and now will work differently or even break. Ideally we'd be able to test on such a system, but I don't know where to find that hardware.

  This fix has been in groovy since just after beta (minus an innocuous
  debug statement that upstream requested during review), and the same
  patches apply cleanly to focal, which should help mitigate the risk by
  way of some real world exposure.

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