Package: src:debian-installer-utils Severity: serious For a reason unknown to me, helpers like in-target and apt-install, by way of chroot_setup and chroot_cleanup, might actually cause /target/proc to be unmounted. This then breaks grub-install. Arguably, commit 795bfde of grub-installer hacks around this problem, when actually I don't think there is any reason why /target/proc (or /target/sys, etc.) should ever be unmounted before it's time to unmount the /target tree.
In my case, I was experimenting with preseeding when suddenly, grub-install failed. The reason was a missing /target/proc. Thinking that /target/proc should not have been unmounted, I used the console to chdir() to it, thereby causing umount to fail. Here is what syslog documented: Apr 7 15:05:07 in-target: Setting up popularity-contest (1.56) ... Apr 7 15:05:08 pkgsel: umount: can't umount /target/proc: Device or resource busy Apr 7 15:05:08 /bin/in-target: warning: Unable to umount '/target/proc' Apr 7 15:05:08 in-target: (Reading database ...· Apr 7 15:05:08 in-target: 14789 files and directories currently installed.) Apr 7 15:05:08 in-target: Removing popularity-contest ... Apr 7 15:05:08 in-target: Purging configuration files for popularity-contest ... Later, I used network-console and a while loop to track the state of /proc/mounts and I found that /target/proc randomly appeared and disappeared. By the time grub-install is run, it isn't present. I don't know whether the above, popcon-associated instance of umount is at fault, but I do question why /target/proc ever gets unmounted. The version of d-i I am using doesn't have Steve's commit yet, so grub-install just fails. I can reproduce this, I can even give network-console access to the host I am using for testing, and stand by on IRC for debugging. It's a KVM instance provisioned by virt-install and preseeded, so it's trivial to work with… -- System Information: Debian Release: 7.0 APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 3.8-trunk-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_NZ, LC_CTYPE=en_NZ.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash -- .''`. martin f. krafft <madduck@d.o> Related projects: : :' : proud Debian developer http://debiansystem.info `. `'` http://people.debian.org/~madduck http://vcs-pkg.org `- Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems
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