Package: debian-installer Severity: normal Dear Maintainer,
I have observed some failures when running debian-installer in a paravirtualized Xen environment, but I do not believe that this issue is necessarily limited to paravirtualized Xen. When running the installer with a preseed file, installation fails at random points during the process. For instance, I have seen it fail as soon as the "choose language" step. Or it may fail when downloading installer components. In some instances, the file /var/lib/dpkg/info/lilo-installer.isinstallable goes missing, and the line "d-i lilo-installer/skip boolean true" from my preseed file is ignored. When manually running the installer, the program has been known to fail at the first step, "choose language". I spent some time tracking down the problem, and I believe it is caused by race conditions due to running multiple copies of the installer in parallel. My Xen domU is booted with the kernel command line "console=hvc0", and /proc/consoles has two entries: hvc0 and tty0. I have not seen the issues described above on a system that only has one entry in /proc/consoles. For instance, a Xen domU using HVM virtualization and booted with the kernel command line "console=ttyS0" only has a single entry in /proc/consoles. -- System Information: Debian Release: 10.0 APT prefers stable APT policy: (500, 'stable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 4.19.0-5-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU core) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
