pbatard
commented
3 years ago No surprise there. This is a consequence of a regression from Red Hat in Anaconda, that ultimately forced us to add exceptions to enforce DD mode for distros that are based on RH 8.2 or later.
I tried to raise the issue in the CentOS forums, since they were affected, but they aggressively dismissed it as "This is not a Red Hat issue, this is a Rufus issue", without realizing that this needed to be reported upstream to avoid more Red Hat derivatives to be affected... as we are seeing now.
To be honest, at this stage, I am starting to get REALLY fed up of all the distros who equate ISOHybrid with DD only, and appear to have no clue that, there are plenty of people out there who don't want to use a third party application like Rufus, Etcher or even dd to create bootable media for booting a UEFI system when (provided that there doesn't exist a file large than 4 GB on the ISO, which I'm not aware any prominent Linux distro to have) they should just be able to create a FAT32 partition and extract all the content there for it too boot. This, in essence, is ISO mode. And even if it may seem counter intuitive, there are clear advantages to using ISO mode for Windows users, as highlighted here.
Debian understand this. Arch and Ubuntu understand this. Other popular distro understand this. Some of them make sure they do test this method of creating bootable media on UEFI system to ensure that it works. And yeah, it does mean extra work from distro maintainers, but when the idea is that it should improve the overall user experience and provide users with a choice of how they can install the OS, it should be a very easy decision.
Unfortunately, Red Hat and its derivative, as well as some other distros like Manjaro, appear to have taken the approach that they should minimize the amount of work required from their maintainers, so they see ISO mode (which should really be called "UEFI standard file copy boot") as something that they should not have to bother with, and will push back very strongly at the idea that anything but DD copy should be used for media creation even if, again, the end result is that users who wish to install their distros will be, at the very least, inconvenienced (due to having less methods they can use to create boot media) and at worst, as I could point to many, many reddit threads where that happens, under the impression that the media they created in DD mode must be faulty when they can only see a small ESP out of it in Windows, and therefore, not attempt to boot the distro at all!
Now, if you can give me the ISO label scheme that you plan to use for your images, I can try to add another regexp to set it as DD-only in the next version Rufus (which, again, is less than ideal because it DOES lead to Windows users ditching the distro altogether).
Or, as you should do to prevent yet another instance of a RH derivative needing to figure out why the media creation mode recommended by Rufus does not work, you should liaise with Red Hat and try to make them understand that:
- No, ISOHybrid does not equate DD.
- They REALLY should test the media creation path that consist of extracting the ISO content to a FAT32 partition and booting on a UEFI system (which again, is not Rufus specific and which any user on Linux, Mac, Windows and so on can usually accomplish without the need to install a specific tool or even to use command line).
- They ARE going to lose users if they continue to brush this issue as something that they don't need to concern themselves with, or something that it's up to third party utilities like Rufus to take care of.
marcosfrm
github-actions[bot]
Rocky is a new RHEL 8 clone after the CentOS Stream drama (aka premature CentOS 8 EOL).
We are using it to replace CentOS 8 in our machines, but unfortunately Rocky also drinks the ISOHybrid kool-aid:
If I select "ISO file" it still says "Error setting up base repository".
It would be nice add it to the ISOHybrid kool-aid drinkers list (and probably AlmaLinux too). Anaconda should not be this dumb...