Progresses with MondoRescue 3.2.2

Of course I’m late. No surprise here 😦 I think the only day I’m not will be for my death 😉

So 3.2.1 was published the 31st of August 2015.
Version 3.2.2 was supposed to be a maintenance version of that one and was thus planned to be published mid October 2015. However, there were requests from various users to provide a version supporting UEFI boot mode on ProLiant servers. That enhancement request alone accounts for most of the delay encountered while developing this version as it turned out to be way more impacting than I thought.

So some bugs encountered on previous versions have been solved:

• mondoarchive doesn’t store NFS information correctly (http://trac.mondorescue.org/ticket/785)
• mondo v3.2.1 completes successfully but glibc detect an invalid pointer and process crashes (http://trac.mondorescue.org/ticket/766)
• add support for Smartarray b120i closed drivers (http://trac.mondorescue.org/ticket/751)
• USB keyboard stop responding during mondorestore (http://trac.mondorescue.org/ticket/779)

However with regards to the single enhancement request in that version to add UEFI support, many tickets were made:

• modoarchive fails as option ‘-e’ is not supported by genisoimage / mkisofs (http://trac.mondorescue.org/ticket/776 and http://trac.mondorescue.org/ticket/782) (already fixed)
• mondorestore doesn’t restore labelled vfat partitions (http://trac.mondorescue.org/ticket/778) (root cause seems to have been found – a fix is under test, but first result are not fully satisfying)
• mindi doesn’t detect UEFI based systems (http://trac.mondorescue.org/ticket/717) (already fixed)
• mondoarchive doesn’t create a bootable UEFI media on RHEL7 (http://trac.mondorescue.org/ticket/777)

The last one, is the most tricky to solve.
MondoRescue uses since day one a single bootloader, coming from the syslinux project, to manage all boot media it generate :
– isolinux for bootable CD/DVD and tapes
– syslinux for bootable USB devices
– pxelinux for bootable network setup.

This has the advantage of homogeneity and simplifies what the mindi tool has to generate in order to implement that support.

However, when using syslinux.efi to provide a bootable media on HPE ProLiant servers setup in UEFI boot mode, we obtain red screen showing a boot time crash.

Despite many attempts first with various options, then with the help of the syslinux community back in October 2015 (Cf: http://www.syslinux.org/archives/2015-October/024469.html and
the related thread) using beta versions of syslinux or the latest ProLiant Firmware, I never succeeded in obtaining a UEFI bootable syslinux based media 😦

I’ve had contacts in December 2015 with the ProLiant Firmware engineering team, but we didn’t had yet a joint work on this issue. My plan would be to first diagnose precisely the origin of that error with this team, and then depending on the results to invite them around the table with the syslinux developers during potentially an upcoming LinuxCon NA (August 2016) to solve it for good.

As all that means we won’t have a final solution with syslinux.efi before end of summer 2016 at the earliest. Therefore, I’ve worked on adding support for other boot
loaders in MondoRescue.

Grub 0.99 support was added in August 2015 before the publication of 3.2.1 and we had success testing a full backup/recovery cycle on RHEL 6, while some other users encountered issues with that. Since November 2015, that should was considered fairly stable, and thus was made the default for RHEL 6 only.

Grub 2.0x support was added very recently (the 22nd of February 2016) with other modifications required to better support correctly mutiple boot loaders on multiple backup media (consolidation of code split into different functions in mindi). This was now tested successfully yesterday and I was able to make a full cycle with mindi on a physical server with RHEL 7. The restore now even present the MondoRescue menu to choose from.

However, while mindi now seems to be working fine for this configuration, this is still not the case for mondoarchive. I’ve started to unify the UEFI support between the 2 tools, and hopefully this week I should see positive results leading to a test version published for the MondoRescue community to try RSN ! And with your retunrs, I should be able to publish that long awaited version rapidly after around start of April probably.

I understand it took much more time than expected initially, and I’ve been myself giving wrong estimates for the delivery of the new version many times. Let’s hope this time I’ll be more accurate.
Hope this explains more the ground reasons why it was so, and the attempt to mitigate the real problem we have with syslinux on UEFI boot mode that may not be solved soon.

Tags: Linux, Mondorescue, Open Source, RHEL, UEFI