Bug#283303: Analysis and possible workaround

[Anton Zinoviev <anton@lml.bas.bg>]

On Sat, Dec 11, 2004 at 02:32:38AM -0500, Jurij Smakov wrote:
> 
> After that I used partman to create two partitions on /dev/sdb, one 256 MB 
> for swap and the rest (1.9 GB) for home. Initially disk had a freshly 
> created disklabel, so all the space was shown as FREE. After the changes 
> were committed, the file /partman.log contents read:
> 
> --debugging output in /partman.log------------------------------------------
> before: 
> device=/var/lib/partman/devices/=dev=scsi=host0=bus0=target1=lun0=disc 
> id=0-255221759
> Disk geometry for /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target1/lun0/disc: 0.000-2063.830 
> megabytes
> Disk label type: sun
> Minor    Start       End     Filesystem  Flags
> 1          0.000    243.398
> 2        243.398   2062.801  ext3
>  after: status=OK
> Disk geometry for /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target1/lun0/disc: 0.000-2063.830 
> megabytes
> Disk label type: loop
> Minor    Start       End     Filesystem  Flags
> 1          0.000   2063.830  linux-swap

I think that the sun disk labels do not reserve special place on the
disk to keep the partition table.  The partition table resides at the
start of the disk but the first partition is allowed to start right
there.  Thats why the first partition may not contain swap, LVM or RAID.
(Most file systems do not change the first sector so they are allowed.)
Can you check if this bug still exists when the swap space does not
start at the beginning of the disk?

Anton Zinoviev