Workaround for ARM Upgrades from RHEL8 to RHEL9.5 onwards (GRUB and kernel incompatibility)

[dkubek]

This actor addresses an issue encountered during the upgrade process on ARM systems. Specifically, the problem arises due to an incompatibility between the GRUB bootloader used in RHEL 8 and the newer kernels from RHEL 9.5 onwards. When the kernel of the target system is loaded using the bootloader from the source system, this incompatibility causes the bootloader to crash, halting the upgrade.

To mitigate this issue, the following steps are implemented:

Before the Upgrade (handled by AddArmBootloaderWorkaround):

• Create a new Upgrade EFI entry:

  • A new EFI boot entry is created and populated with the updated RHEL 9 bootloader that is compatible with the new kernel.

• Preserve the original EFI boot entry and GRUB configuration:

  • The original EFI boot entry and GRUB configuration remain unchanged to ensure system stability.

After the Upgrade (handled by RemoveUpgradeEFIEntry):

• Remove the upgrade EFI boot entry:
  • The temporary EFI boot entry created for the upgrade is removed to restore the system to its pre-upgrade state.

TODO:

• [ ] Add description of the grub library to docs

JIRA: 41193

[github-actions[bot]]

Thank you for contributing to the Leapp project!

Please note that every PR needs to comply with the Leapp Guidelines and must pass all tests in order to be mergeable. If you want to request a review or rebuild a package in copr, you can use following commands as a comment:

• review please @oamg/developers to notify leapp developers of the review request
• /packit copr-build to submit a public copr build using packit

Packit will automatically schedule regression tests for this PR's build and latest upstream leapp build. However, here are additional useful commands for packit:

• /packit test to re-run manually the default tests
• /packit retest-failed to re-run failed tests manually
• /packit test oamg/leapp#42 to run tests with leapp builds for the leapp PR#42 (default is latest upstream - master - build)

Note that first time contributors cannot run tests automatically - they need to be started by a reviewer.

It is possible to schedule specific on-demand tests as well. Currently 2 test sets are supported, beaker-minimal and kernel-rt, both can be used to be run on all upgrade paths or just a couple of specific ones. To launch on-demand tests with packit:

• /packit test --labels kernel-rt to schedule kernel-rt tests set for all upgrade paths
• /packit test --labels beaker-minimal-8.10to9.4,kernel-rt-8.10to9.4 to schedule kernel-rt and beaker-minimal test sets for 8.10->9.4 upgrade path

See other labels for particular jobs defined in the .packit.yaml file.

Please open ticket in case you experience technical problem with the CI. (RH internal only)

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[dkubek]

/packit copr-build

[packit-as-a-service[bot]]

Based on your Packit configuration the settings of the @oamg/leapp Copr project would need to be updated as follows:

field	old value	new value
bootstrap	on	default

Packit was unable to update the settings above as it is missing admin permissions on the @oamg/leapp Copr project.

To fix this you can do one of the following:

• Grant Packit admin permissions on the @oamg/leapp Copr project on the permissions page.
• Change the above Copr project settings manually on the settings page to match the Packit configuration.
• Update the Packit configuration to match the Copr project settings.

Please retrigger the build, once the issue above is fixed.