[Bug 1815002] Re: quick-boot-lvm.patch caused regression - menu always appear if root is on Btrfs

[anymouse]

Hi, my system is affected as well (installed ubuntu as the only system using LVM), so I would like to ask whether my understanding of the problem as follows is correct.
I would also like to know whether bug reports have been filed regarding the 5)a) and 5)b) points, or if there has been any other progress on this bug.


1) Normally, intended behavior of Grub is that if boot of an operating system is unsuccessful, the 'recordfail' variable is set, which causes Grub timeout during the next boot to be GRUB_RECORDFAIL_TIMEOUT instead of GRUB_TIMEOUT, to give the user enough time to boot the recovery environment.

2) Grub normally writes this 'recordfail' variable to the operating
system partition, but since Grub lacks the ability to write to BTRFS or
any LVM partition, Grub wouldn't be able to set the 'recordfail'
variable in the case of unsuccessful boot. This could potentially leave
the user needing to boot to recovery, but unable to do it, when
GRUB_TIMEOUT is set to 0.

3) Currently implemented workaround for 2) is for the 'recordfail'
variable to be set permanently, if Grub is unable to write the variable
to disk. This causes Grub to ignore GRUB_TIMEOUT every time and wait for
30 seconds instead, which is the default value of
GRUB_RECORDFAIL_TIMEOUT.

4) This happens by default on every EFI system where user chooses to
install Ubuntu with LVM partitioning (my case) or (I'm not sure about
this one) if user chooses to use BTRFS partition during the install.

5) Possible solutions would be one of the following:

  a) Ubuntu installer should create partitions in such a way that leaves
a small separate partition that would be writable by Grub.

  b) Implement ability to store environment variables on the EFI System Partition (ESP) which is FAT32 and already is created by the installer. This has been mentioned in #16 and #17.
  
  c) Implement functionality to write to LVM, BTRFS, and other possibly affected filesystems. This is not gonna happen due to complexity and unnecessity.
  
6) Possible workarounds are:

  a) In /etc/default/grub set the variable GRUB_RECORDFAIL_TIMEOUT to small but non-zero amount of seconds. Setting it to zero is strongly discouraged as it could leave system unable to boot to recovery or other entries in case of boot fail, although RussinNeuroMancer describes in #14 that they're able to reliably enter Grub even if this is set to 0.
  
  b) Manually repartition the system in such a way that Grub's recordfail functionality works. I don't know what exactly is needed for this, though, but I would be tremendously grateful if anyone does this and shares how to do it.

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Title:
  quick-boot-lvm.patch caused regression - menu always appear if root is
  on Btrfs

Status in Default settings and artwork for Baltix OS:
  Triaged
Status in grub2 package in Ubuntu:
  Opinion
Status in grub2 package in Baltix:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  Comments about this regression:

  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1800722/comments/12
  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1800722/comments/13

  In my case menu starting to always appear on various devices from
  small tablets to workstations. First time it happened with laptop
  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/736743/comments/95
  and since then more devices became affected. I not 100% sure, but
  seems like at least one unsuccessfully boot is required to reproduce
  this issue, but maybe I am mistake here and issue starting to happen
  for all Btrfs users.

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