Re: bookworm/sid: new interactive system locale setting on first boot

[Florian Bezdeka <florian.bezdeka@siemens.com>]

On 07.10.22 16:10, Jan Kiszka wrote:
> On 07.10.22 15:55, Henning Schild wrote:
>> Am Fri, 7 Oct 2022 15:25:13 +0200
>> schrieb Jan Kiszka <jan.kiszka@siemens.com>:
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> just installed a simple image (isar-cip-core) from a fresh sid of
>>> today and got this on first boot:
>>>
>>>
>>> Welcome to your new installation of Debian GNU/Linux bookworm/sid!
>>>
>>> Please configure your system!
>>>
>>> -- Press any key to proceed --[  OK  ] Finished Flush Journal to
>>> Persistent Storage. [  OK  ] Finished Load/Save Random Seed.
>>>          Starting Regenerate sshd host keys...
>>> [  OK  ] Finished Coldplug All udev Devices.
>>>          Starting Helper to synchronize boot up for ifupdown...
>>> [  OK  ] Finished Helper to synchronize boot up for ifupdown.
>>> [  OK  ] Finished Regenerate sshd host keys.
>>> l
>>> ‣ Please enter system locale name or number (empty to skip, "list" to
>>> list options): list 1) C.UTF-8                  2) en_US.UTF-8
>>>    
>>>
>>> ‣ Please enter system locale name or number (empty to skip, "list" to
>>> list options):
>>>
>>>
>>> Anyone seens this already as well? What could be missing to
>>> preconfigure things as before?
>>
>> Not seen before sorry. I did build and boot
>> mc:qemuamd64-bookworm:isar-image-base from isar next today, that was ok.
>>
>> Maybe ro rootfs issues?
>>
> 
> Kernel command line: console=hvc1 console=ttyS0 root=/dev/vda rw
> 
> Would have been too easy. It's a qemu-riscv64 target. Let me check if 
> Isar itself is affected.

I can see the same thing for an arm64 image. In my case there is no 
error about locales, I'm just stuck at first boot. systemd is 
waiting for a key press which never happens.

It turned out that systemd introduced a new service called 
systemd-firstboot which can be used to setup some basic system 
information like hostname, timezone, root password, ... during 
first boot.

Upstream commit:
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/418b9be50018303cde79b423d4701b7fd86ddbdc

This is part of systemd 216 onwoards and Debian enabled it with 
the last release (251.5-1) in bookworm at 2022-10-02.

According to commit above the new service is started when /etc is 
found unpopulated. I guess this is why the service is somehow 
linked to /etc/machine-id.

Maybe Isar should mask that service if present?

> 
> Jan
>