Installation

The following release notes for the Anaconda installer and related components are taken from the upstream version.

Changes in the graphical interface

Use keyboard layout configuration from the Live system

Until now, users had to specify keyboard layout for the Live environment manually in Anaconda. With this change, live system itself is responsible for the keyboard configuration and Anaconda just reads the configuration from the live system for the installed system.

The live keyboard layout is used automatically only if the user does not specify it manually. At this moment, only Gnome Shell environment is supported.

This is proper fix for RHBZ#2016613 which was resolved by a workaround in the past. It is also a step forward to resolve RHBZ#1955025.

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Changes in Kickstart support

New kickstart options to control DNS handling

There are several new options for the network kickstart command to control handling of DNS:

  • The --ipv4-dns-search and --ipv6-dns-search allow manual setting of DNS search domains. These options mirror their respective NetworkManager properties, for example:

    network --device ens3 --ipv4-dns-search example.com,custom-intranet-domain.biz (...)
  • --ipv4-ignore-auto-dns and --ipv6-ignore-auto-dns allow ignoring DNS settings from DHCP. These options do not take any arguments.

All of these network command options must be used together with the --device option.

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Changes in Anaconda configuration files

Deprecated configuration options are now removed

The following deprecated configuration file options are now removed:

  • kickstart_modules

  • addons_enabled

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Allow to turn off geolocation for language selection

New Localization section with use_geolocation option is added to Anaconda configuration. The option allows to turn off geolocation for language selection.

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Architecture and hardware support changes

Add support for compressed kernel modules

Support for Driver Discs containing compressed kernel modules has been added. Support for compressed kernel modules is limited to file extensions .ko`.bz2`, .ko.gz, .ko.xz and .ko.zst.

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Wait 5 secs during boot for OEMDRV devices

Because disks can take some time to appear, an additional delay of 5 seconds has been added. This can be overridden by boot argument inst.wait_for_disks=<value> to let dracut wait up to <value> additional seconds (0 turns the feature off, causing dracut to only wait up to 500ms). Alternatively, if the OEMDRV device is known to be present but too slow to be autodetected, the user can boot with an argument like inst.dd=hd:LABEL=OEMDRV to indicate that dracut should expect an OEMDRV device and not start the installer until it appears.

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General changes

New Runtime module

Anaconda now has a new D-Bus module called Runtime. This module stores run-time configuration of the installer and provides methods for the overall installer flow control.

This module must always run, or anaconda crashes. Users of the following configuration file entries must adapt to this change:

  • kickstart_modules

  • activatable_modules

  • forbidden_modules

  • optional_modules

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Make the EFI System Partition at least 500MiB in size

The minimum size of the EFI System Partition (ESP) created by Anaconda has changed from 200 MiB to 500 MiB. The maximum size, which is used in most cases, remains at 600 MiB.

The reasons for this change include: * This partition is used to deploy firmware updates. These updates need free space of twice the SPI flash size, which will grow from 64 to 128 MiB in near future and make the current partition size too small. * The new minimum is identical with what Microsoft mandates OEMs allocate for the partition.

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Respect preferred disk label type provided by blivet

In Fedora 37, anaconda was changed to always format disks with GPT disk labels, so long as blivet reported that the platform supports them at all (even if blivet indicated that MBR labels should be preferred). This was intended to implement a plan to prefer GPT disk labels on x86_64 BIOS installs, but in fact resulted in GPT disk labels also being used in other cases. Now, we go back to respecting the preferred disk label type indicated by blivet, by default (a corresponding change has been made to blivet to make it prefer GPT labels on x86_64 BIOS systems). The inst.disklabel option can still be used to force a preference for gpt or mbr if desired.

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Install an image using systemd-boot rather than grub

With this release, systemd-boot can be selected as an alternative boot loader for testing and development purposes.

This can be done with inst.sdboot from the grub/kernel command line or with --sdboot in a kickstart file as part of the bootloader command. The resulting machine should be free of grub, shim, and grubby packages, with all the boot files on the EFI System Partition (ESP). This may mean that it is wise to dedicate the space previously allocated for /boot to the ESP in order to assure that future kernel upgrades will have sufficient space.

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