Hello everybody,

I have finally found the root cause of the problem. It is indeed in
the size of "initramfs" that ironic-python-agent-builder produces.
They are all normally 350-420 MB large (compressed). However, since
boot protocol 2.03 kernel explicitly limits highest initrd address
available to the bootloader
(https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/x86/boot.txt), thus limits
the size of initrd that could be used. Therefore none of production
IPA initramfs images from official location:
https://tarballs.openstack.org/ironic-python-agent/dib/files/, nor
custom made by ironic-python-agent-builder can not boot. The
bootloader is just crashing on them.

When I turned to TinyIPA from here:
https://tarballs.openstack.org/ironic-python-agent/tinyipa/files/
(which are explicitly marked not for production), it worked well and
booted the IPA. So I will proceed with Tiny, but it might be useful to
give hint of to others.

Thanks anyway for support from everybody here.

See you!

-Vuk

They are in the range of 400MB

On Tue, May 11, 2021 at 11:08 PM Vuk Gojnic <vuk.gojnic@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Francois,
>
> Thanks for the reply.
>
> I am using esp from Ubuntu install iso. Intentionally go to Grub prompt to play with kernel parameters in attempt to debug.
>
> linuxefi/initrdefi had seemingly same behaviour like linux/initrd.
>
> What I actually just detected is that if I try to do “ls” of the device where kernel and initrd are residing it lists it correctly, but if I do “ls -la” it lists couple of files, but when it comes to initrd it freezes and I get again “Red Screen of Death” with same errors.
>
> Initrd that works just fine is 52MB big and uncompressed, while the one That blocks is 406MB big compressed. I started suspecting that the problem us is filesize limit.
>
> -Vuk
>
> Sent from my Telekom.de iPhone 14 prototype
>
> > On 11. May 2021, at 21:28, Francois <rigault.francois@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi! Out of curiosity, how did you generate the esp?
> > Normally Ironic will build a grub.cfg file and include it into the
> > iso, then it is loaded automatically (providing the grub_config_path
> > is properly set) so you don't have anything to type by hand... That
> > grub.cfg default template uses "linuxefi" and "initrdefi" (instead of
> > linux/initrd you are using) which seem correct for most distributions
> > (but depending on the way you built the esp, if you used grub from
> > sources for example, linux/initrd would still be the right commands).
> > Maybe you can try the "efi" variants.
> >
> > Best of luck!
> > Francois (frigo)
> >