whole disk RAID partitioned directly, with Grub BIOS partition

[Iordan Iordanov]

Hello,

We are using FAI 3.48 with Ubuntu 12.04. We are trying to come up with a 
working setup-storage config for whole disk RAID. We've managed to put 
together a configuration with LVM, but we can't get grub2 to install in 
that configuration, so we would like to avoid LVM altogether and keep it 
simple. The working LVM-based config is such:

disk_config raid
raid1  -  sda,sdb - -

disk_config lvm
vg  vg0   md0
vg0-root /    16000 ext4 rw,errors=remount-ro createopts="-m3"
vg0-swap swap 4000  swap sw
vg0-var  /var 5000  ext4 rw                   createopts="-m5"

I will enumerate what we would like to accomplish:

1) Be able to parition /dev/m0 directly without LVM. When paritioning an 
md device, setup-storage tries find a partition /dev/md01, whereas the 
partition really is /dev/md0p1. We tried to do this with:

disk_config /dev/md0

2) We would like to give options to mdadm (e.g. to set metadata to 0.9),

3) We would like to be able to give options to parted (e.g. to create a 
GRUB BIOS boot partition). The option to parted needs to be of the form 
"set N bios_grub on", where N is the partition number.

Here is an example config that we would like to be able to give to 
setup-storage:
===============================================
disk_config raid
raid1  -  sda,sdb - -             raidopts="--metadata=0.9"

disk_config /dev/md0
primary  -           8     -    - partedopts="set 1 bios_grub on"
primary  /       15000  ext4    rw,errors=remount-ro    createopts="-m3"
logical  swap     1000  swap    sw
logical  /var     2000  ext4    rw                      createopts="-m5"
===============================================

Please note the "raidopts" and "partedopts" settings above. We thought 
it would not be possible to use "createopts" here, due to ambiguity, but 
that may not be the case.

We couldn't see an updated manual for FAI 4.0. Is any of this in there? 
Alternatively, has there been any work done to implement any of the 
above, and if not would you accept a patch if we take our stab at adding 
support for this?

Many thanks!

Iordan Iordanov
CDF System Administrator,
University of Toronto