[CentOS] centos8 / anaconda EFI regression / HFS+ ESP

Wed Nov 11 13:41:27 UTC 2020
Fabian Arrotin <arrfab at centos.org>

On 10/11/2020 17:18, Leon Fauster via CentOS wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> years ago I had no problem installing CentOS7 on my
> iMac workstation (iMac Late 2015). The installation
> worked out of the box. Today I wanted to upgrade to
> CentOS8 and while configuring the partitions I get an
> error that the installation can not start because:
> "HFS+ ESP needed and mounted on /boot/efi". In fact
> they are the same partition as for CentOS7. Is this
> a regression of anaconda, implying that the EFI partition
> must be HFS based? I can boot CentOS7 with the vfat EFI
> partition ...
> 
> -- 
> Leon
> 

Hi Leon,

Same problem for me on my wife's iMac (24" , 2018 model) : running
CentOS 7 perfectly fine but I replaced original sata HDD with a SSD some
months ago and wanted to reinstall with CentOS 8 and same result, so I
finally reinstalled it with 7 again, and put that on my "TODO" list.

As you can see, some upstream changes landed in anaconda when detecting
Mac/Apple hardware and it works fine with Fedora (tested already)
because both hfs/hfs+ support exist in kernel and hfsplus-tools package
too.

Of course it was removed from RHEL kernel (and packages list) so I have
some ideas in mind but never had time to investigate further (as iMac
also runs fine with CentOS 7)

One idea was to "modify" on the fly anaconda (with updates.img) to *not*
use HFS+ part but instead vfat. There are ways to do that but one first
need to find which python code to mod in anaconda (and then see if such
method still works :
https://arrfab.net/posts/2011/Jun/11/modifying-anaconda-behaviour-without-rebuilding-the-whole-install-media/)

Other idea : respin an iso/tree that would use different kernel and
access to hfsplus-tools pkg and so no need to "hack" anaconda

So many ideas, but not enough time to investigate this for now ...

-- 
Fabian Arrotin
The CentOS Project | https://www.centos.org
gpg key: 17F3B7A1 | twitter: @arrfab

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20201111/26b5d1db/attachment-0005.sig>