Package: virtinst Version: 1:1.4.0-5 Severity: minor Hi,
I'm trying to fully automatically install virtual machines by means of a preseed file. I set "--location" to the desired URL and add some parameters to "--extra-args" to ask debian-installer to run an automated installation, tell it where to fetch the preseed file, and add some parameters that I want copied to the installed system's boot configuration (for example "elevator=noop"). This works almost perfectly, but there one slight problem: for a reason I don't understand, virt-install adds "method=<contents of --location option>" to the kernel parameters (qemu's "-append" option), *after* the contents of "--extra-args". As stated in its documentation, debian-installer will copy most kernel parameters found after "--" or "---" to the installed system's boot configuration (eg. in /etc/default/grub), filtering the ones it thinks are destined to itself; so if the "--extra-args" option contains "--" or "---", the "method=..." argument ends up being copied in /etc/default/grub, which of course is not desired. Obviously, debian-installer filter doesn't catch it. Now, I'm not sure what would be the correct fix for this. I see two possibilities: - the conservative (and simple) one: modify virt-install to add "method=..." *before* the contents of "--extra-args", so that if the latter contains "--" or "---", "method=..." will be positioned before those, and won't be copied to the installed system's boot configuration. - the risky one: modify virt-install to not add "method=..." at all; after re-reading debian-installer's documentation, I didn't see this parameter mentioned anywhere. Come to think of it, this shouldn't be needed: virt-install already fetches the kernel and initrd, and passes them to the VM, so I can't see why debian-installer should need to know how they were fetched. If the second suggestion is totally wrong, and debian-installer does know (and thus, sometimes need) "method=..." (it should be documented, then !), maybe the bug should be reassigned to debian-installer, and ask to add "method=..." to the list of filtered parameters, to prevent it to be passed to Grub. I tried to find by myself where the "-append" option is constructed, to provide a patch for the first fix, but I don't know much python and couldn't understand the scripts. If you give me a hint about this, I'll be glad to (try to) help. Regards, -- Raphaël Halimi
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