Installation

Table of Contents

Fedora 34 contains two potentially breaking changes related to system installation:

  • Multiple Kickstart commands have been deprecated or removed. Deprecated commands in Kickstarts will cause warnings, and removed commands will cause the installation to fail. Notably, this includes the install command, which is used in many older Kickstart files. See Deprecated and removed Kickstart commands and options for a full list of deprecations and removals.

  • All installer boot options now must use the inst. prefix, which was previously optional but recommended. Anaconda boot options such as inst.repo= will now be ignored if they do not use this prefix.

Anaconda changes

This section covers changes in the Anaconda installer, including changes in the graphical and text mode interactive installers, Kickstart, and installer boot options.

General changes

  • The filesystem image containing the Anaconda installer, images/install.img, which is present both in DVD and netinstall ISOs, no longer embeds an ext4 filesystem image. Instead, files are stored directly in SquashFS, without an intermediate ext4 layer. Installer content is stored more efficiently this way, resulting in savings of up to 27MiB per ISO.

  • The installer mounts /tmp of the installed system as a tmpfs during the installation. (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1306452)

  • The installer installs the kbd-legacy package to support non-ascii keyboard layouts. (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1919483)

  • Crashes in wireless networking configuration in installer GUI have been fixed. (https://github.com/rhinstaller/anaconda/pull/2977)

  • Persistent network configuration from Kickstart configuration is now created in a later stage (not in initramfs), so all the persistent configuration files are generated using the NetworkManager API, which results in:

    • Consistency between common kickstart configuration and configuration via kickstart %pre section (the same code path is used).

    • Consistency of generated configuration files. All files are now stored in the format configured in NetworkManager. In Fedora 33 configuration files created from kickstart configuration were stored in ifcfg files while other configuration paths (boot options, UI) were using keyfile files.

  • Added a metapackage for image dependencies - useful when generating boot.iso. (The plan is to eventually move stuff from lorax templates to there.) (https://github.com/rhinstaller/anaconda/pull/3126)

  • Removed support for the nfsiso: pseudo-protocol. Anaconda can these days detect that a nfs: target is an ISO file, so nfsiso: became redundant. (https://github.com/rhinstaller/anaconda/pull/2889)

Changes in boot options

  • The inst. prefix, which was previously recommended for use with Anaconda-specific boot options, is now mandatory. Anaconda boot options such as inst.stage2= or inst.repo= will now be ignored if they do not use the prefix. This change helps Anaconda avoid conflicts with other projects which may use the same kernel parameters. You can read the discussion of this change on the devel mailing list.

  • The following boot options have been removed:

    • inst.singlelang - The single language mode has been removed some time ago.

    • inst.loglevel - Did not work.

    • inst.zram - Anaconda uses zram-generator instead.

Changes in the graphical interface

Changes in the text interface

Changes in Anaconda configuration files

Changes in updates images

Kickstart changes

Deprecated and removed Kickstart commands and options

This version brings a big cleanup of unused, deprecated, and removed commands and options. Deprecated commands and options no longer do anything and log a warning, and removed commands and options cause errors and break the installation.

  • Removed commands:

    • autostep

    • device

    • deviceprobe

    • dmraid

    • install

    • method

    • multipath

  • Removed options:

    • bootloader --upgrade

    • harddrive --biospart

    • ignoredisk --interactive

    • partition --active

  • Removed the %traceback section - use %onerror instead.

  • Deprecated options:

    • timezone --ntpservers, --nontp

    • logging --level

    • %packages --excludeWeakdeps (use --exclude-weakdeps instead), --InstLangs (use --inst-langs instead)

    • repo --ignoregroups, --sslcacert, --sslclientcert, --sslclientkey