[Bug 2121978] Re: Subiquity crashes for 1 malformed network adapter name.

[Olivier Gayot]

Hello william-hunt,

Thanks for the bug report.

Could you please specify which ISO you used?

We did something similar a while back to work around invalid UTF-8 in
udev's PARTNAME property:

I suspect we need to do the same for network interfaces.

https://github.com/canonical/probert/commit/19afefc809710942a098ed05b1886ff122c67156

Could you please run the following on the affected machine and share the
resulting file?

$ udevadm info -e > udevadm.txt

Thanks,
Olivier

** Changed in: subiquity (Ubuntu)
       Status: New => Incomplete

** Also affects: subiquity
   Importance: Undecided
       Status: New

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2121978

Title:
  Subiquity crashes for 1 malformed network adapter name.

Status in subiquity:
  New
Status in subiquity package in Ubuntu:
  Incomplete

Bug description:
  Booting the live installer gave a UnicodeDecodeError when trying to
  read my Wi-Fi card as there are some malformed characters appended to
  its name as it appears in Window's Disk Management (2nd image in the
  uploaded PDF). The "Friendly Name" as it appears in the Windows
  Registry is "MediaTek Wi-Fi 6E MT7922 (RZ616) 160MHz PCIe Adapter",
  and the description is "@oem22.inf,%rz616.devicedescexc%;MediaTek Wi-
  Fi 6E MT7922 (RZ616) 160MHz PCIe Adapter". Those are both similar but
  different to the name that appears on the installer, but it has "USB
  WW WLAN<?>R<<?><?>N/A" appended, where "<?>" are non-ASCII characters
  that are unable to be displayed. The traceback shows `'utf-8' codec
  can't decode byte 0xec in position 80`, which means the bytes are
  invalid. This is likely a bug in the Wi-Fi adapter's firmware or
  EEPROM data, but giving a fatal crash from reading malformed
  characters is a bug, this is unnecessary and a warning that one of the
  network adapters wasn't able to be read should be given instead. Since
  Ubuntu should be designed for general users unlike other more involved
  distros like Arch, encoding issues should all be handled by Subiquity
  and not cause the installer to fail to even prepare.

  The only workaround I found was to disable the adapter before the
  error appeared (this had to be done in < 5 seconds), trying to disable
  the adapter after the error by re-running the installer just gives the
  same error, and subsequent runs of the installer result in the loading
  icon just spinning forever with nothing else being shown. If the name
  I had to type was longer, I probably wouldn't have been able to remove
  the module before the error occurred, so this fix isn't reliable.
  Walking through the installer after fixing the network adapter issue,
  it also quit at random button presses the first 3 times, but
  eventually I was able to install Ubuntu. I'm not sure whether this is
  related to removing the module, but I'll include it in this bug report
  in case it is. This issue occurred with another USB, and I was able to
  install Debian on my laptop without any issues.

  I assume this bug can be reproduced by any Wi-Fi network adapter with
  malformed Uncode characters. The fix for this should be to provide a
  warning to the user about the network adapter that failed to be
  decoded, so long as there is 1 network adapter that can be used, in
  which case the installer should fail to prepare as it does now.

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