Gigabyte Brix issues with mender i.c.w. Ubuntu Server 19.04

[kacf]

@PJK

why doesn’t the mender-convert generated image boot through to the active rootfs by itself, without me having to do the trick via the UEFI shell?

It might be a setting in the UEFI firmware, that the Ubuntu directory is prioritized before the BOOT folder. Does it help to delete the former from the 1st partition?

@PJK

if that is fixed, how do I prevent or circumvent the boot failing because the 4G dongle occupies the hd0 device slot in Grub? Is this something that can be done with settings for Mender config files? Strangely enough this was not an issue for the original bootloader, but that used the UUID of the partition to select the rootfs to boot (which won’t work because mender uses an identical UUID for both rootfs partitions)

This is a known problem, and the key issue is exactly that GRUB can use UUIDs of filesystems, but not of partitions. And Mender would need the latter, as filesystem UUIDs are neither stable nor unique in Mender context. This is something that could probably quite easily be implemented in GRUB, but no one has taken on the task yet. There is a task for it in our bug tracker.

There is no out-of-the-box workaround, but it should not be too hard to tweak the grub scripts to look for some key file on the available hard drives, and then assign the right one.