Bug#970882: filesystems that don't begin with empty blocks trash sun disk labels as 1st partition
Package: debian-installer
Version: 20200314
Severity: grave
User: debian-sparc@lists.debian.org
Usertags: sparc64
X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-sparc@lists.debian.org
Currently, the debian installer uses the force(-f) switch on mkfs to
make sure that mkfs doesn't bail creating the first partition on the
disk with an error stating it found a partition label where the
partition start is. This behavior works fine for ext2, which starts
with 2 empty blocks, but for other filesystems like XFS the partition
label is immediately trashed(can be observed by parted reporting the
label type with "loop"). This location was apparently necessary for
SILO, and it always functioned as the first partition created by
guided partitioning was always ext-default and boot first, but now
that debian-sparc64 uses GRUB2 this _probably_ isn't necessary.
In manual partitioning the behavior is trivially replicable by
creating a first partition with an XFS filesystem, where upon choosing
"beginning" for the location of the new filesystem the start is placed
at 0. When formatting happens after confirming this setup, the disk
label is promptly trashed and the system is rendered unbootable.
src: https://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/sundisklabels.html
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