Partitioning on SPARC [Was: Re: LVM setup hard disk]

[Michael Tautschnig]

>    >>
>    > This would probably be nice, since this would IMHO support SPARC too;
>    > meanwhile I reworked your script to use fdisk - would there be any
>    > public interest in such a patch?
> I may have a look at the patch, but using fdisk does not solve the
> problem for other architectures. We need some partition tool, that
> also supports non msdos disk labels. I will not use this patch in the
> official setup_harddisks, until I got a lot of user reports, that this
> also work in their environment. I can't just apply the patch and maybe
> then it's broken for other environment. This is a very fragile part of
> FAI, so please do not expect that I will change things easyly.
Of course - and my patch was thought out just to use my changes on SPARC (it 
tests for Sun-disklabels). Still, there are two problems:

- I don't know that much about perl - and thus I have no idea how to tell fdisk 
which partitions to delete, if one changes the disk_config to use fewer 
partitions - currently all partitions listed in the new disk_config, that are 
not preserved, are deleted. - fdisk in debian/testing (and probably unstable 
too) is buggy when using sector-based addressing. Patching it is simple (see 
attached patch for details), but most of you probably don't want that - so I'd 
ask for (perl)-help to use cylinder-based addresses instead of sector-based 
addresses.

> 
> Please post a link to your setup_harddisk versio to the mailling list,
> and then people can test it and give feedback if it works for them.

You can find my version at http://www.zt-consulting.com/setup_harddisks

Regards,
Michael