Background:
grub2 works in three stages:
- The first stage is found in the first 440 bytes of the master
boot record, and its only purpose is to load and execute the
second stage. This stage is static, and just copied from the rpm
without modification.
- The second stage is found in the gap between the MBR and the
first partition, and may be up to 31kB in size. This stage is
specific to the host and must contain the instructions for
finding the right file system and subdirectory for the grub2
config and modules on the host, as well as the modules needed
to do this.
- The third stage is found in the `normal` module, which loads
grub2.conf, which in turn may load more modules and perform
arbitrary instructions.
Problem:
grub2-install is responsible for installing all these stages on the
target image. This goes against our design, as modifications outside
the filesystem should happen in the assembler, but modifications to
the filesystem should happen in a stage. In particular, we don't
want the contents of the image to differ in any way from the output
tree that is stored in our content store (the output of our last
stage). This causes a practical problem at the moment, as our
selinux stage is ran before the assembler, and as such the grub
modules do not get selinux labels applied.
It turns out that we could split grub2-install in two as we want,
by passing `--no-bootsector` to it to install only the modules,
and copy/genereta the two first stages as files under /boot and
then run `grub2-bios-setup` to write the stages from /boot into
the image where they belong.
Regrettably, this does not work as both `grub2-install` and
`grub2-bios-setup` introspect the system and block devices they
are being run on to generate the right configuration. This is not
what we want, as we would like to specifcy the config explicitly
and run them independently of the target image. The specific bug
we get in both cases is that the canonical path containing our
object store cannot be found.
Before osbuild this was not a problem, as other installers would
instal and assemble everything directly in the target image as a
loopback device. Something we explicitly do not want to do.
Solution:
This patch essentially reimplements grub2-install, or rather the
parts of it that we need. One change in behavior from the upstream
tool is that we no longer write the level one and level two boot
loaders to /boot before moving them into place, but just write them
directly where they belong (so they do not end up on the
filesystem).
The parts that copy files into /boot are now in the grub2 installer
and the parts that write the level one/two bootloaders are in the
qemu assembler.
This achieves a few principles I think we should always adher to:
- never run tools from the target image (no chroot)
- don't read/copy files from the target image that was written
by other stages. We already try to avoid sharing state, and
by treating the image as write-only, we avoid accidentally
sharing state through the target tree.
Based-on-suggestions-from: Javier Martinez Canillas <javierm@redhat.com>
With-god-like-debugging-and-fixes-by: Lars Karlitski <lubreni@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Tom Gundersen <teg@jklm.no>
72c3157162