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Removing the install medium at the Reboot Now screen wedges the machine in an I/O error storm #125

Description

@hegjon

On quattro (reproduced at 268bac1), pulling the install medium once the installer says it is done — at the "Installed Omarchy in …" / Reboot Now screen — leaves the machine unable to reboot, scrolling kernel errors until it is power-cycled.

Reproduce

  1. Boot the ISO and run a normal full-disk install to the finish screen. (QEMU: ISO as an ejectable cdrom device; real hardware: a USB stick.)
  2. At the Reboot Now screen, remove the medium (QMP eject / pull the stick). Nothing complains — the screen sits there looking finished.
  3. Press Reboot Now.

Observed

The graceful reboot's stop jobs immediately fault pages from the medium that is no longer there:

I/O error, dev sr0, sector 2501728 op 0x0:(READ) ...
I/O error, dev loop0, sector 1972766 op 0x0:(READ) ...
SQUASHFS error: Failed to read block 0x3c343fc1: -5
SQUASHFS error: Failed to read block 0x3c343fc1: -5
...

The last line repeats ~100 times a second, indefinitely — after 2.5 minutes the kernel was still failing on the same block. The machine never reboots; the only exit is the power button.

It is worse than a scary screen, because of what is still held at that moment. At the finish screen the target is not released:

/mnt        /dev/mapper/root[/@]      btrfs rw,...
/mnt/home   /dev/mapper/root[/@home]  btrfs rw,...
/mnt/boot   /dev/vda1                 vfat  rw,...
/mnt/swap/swapfile  file  4000508  ...   (ACTIVE swap)
/dev/mapper/root                          (LUKS mapper open)

So the forced power-off this ends in also takes the freshly installed filesystem down rw-mounted with live swap on it.

Why

The live root pages from the install medium on demand (copytoram=n), and a graceful reboot is the worst case for that: its stop jobs page in unit files and ExecStop binaries. The same failure needs no button press on real hardware — during PR #113's A/B testing on a ThinkPad X200, yanking the stick at this screen segfaulted the live system the same way.

Nothing tells the user the medium is still needed: the natural reading of "Installed Omarchy in 0m 55s" is that it is safe to take the stick.

Activity

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