Bug#510544: Installer/partition guide tried to use 500GB as swap

[Ferenc Wagner <wferi@niif.hu>]

Frans Pop <elendil@planet.nl> writes:

> On Sunday 11 January 2009, Ferenc Wagner wrote:
>> I can accept this, but then this BR should not be closed, as the 1 TB
>> limit (which hit the reporter) remains.  People with big disks can
>> still get huge swaps, as no LV can suck up more than 1 TB.
>>
>> Sorry if I didn't manage to make that clear previously.
>
> The title of the BR is "Installer tried to use 500GB as swap". That part 
> I've tested and solved, so this particular BR is IMO correctly closed.

Of course you may have solved it independently of my musings.
Changing k -> K in free size computations as I suggested fixes swap
size with a 100 GB disk, but not with a 1.5 TB disk.

> And TBH I don't even see any 1TB issue in the original report and in your 
> analysis I have not seen *why* we're hitting a 1TB boundary (or maybe 
> I've missed it).

That was in my previous mail <[🔎] 87wsd51l6r.fsf@szonett.ki.iif.hu>.  In
short: the maximal size of the unlimited partition is specified as
1,000,000,000 in the recipes, and the numbers there mean MBs, so
that's 1000 TB.  Today that's big enough to be considered infinite in
all practical cases.  However, perform_recipe_by_lvm rescales these
numbers to mean kBs (by multiplying them by 1000), EXCEPT when the
number is 1,000,000,000 (our supposed infinity) to avoid instant
overflow.  So when using LVM, the maximal size of the unlimited
partition is only 1 TB, and that isn't big enough anymore.  The size
of the would-be-unlimited partition is effectively capped at 1 TB,
so on a 1.5 TB disk swap will be 0.5 TB if it's given all the rest.

> Feel free to clone the BR and reopen it (or file a new report) for
> the 1TB limit issue.

I still think that the 1TB limit issue is this exact bug report.  That
500 GB in the title is 1TB less than the size of the reporter's disk.
-- 
Cheers,
Feri.