Re: Major large-disk bug for cloud-utils / cloud-initramfs-growroot
On 10/22/2014 07:47 AM, Jimmy Kaplowitz wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Looks like growpart and therefore cloud-initramfs-growroot fails
> horribly on disks over 2 TB, resulting in harmfully shrinking the
> partition size:
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/cloud-utils/+bug/1259703
>
> We'd love to use cloud-initramfs-growroot or an equivalent feature, but
> this behavior is of course a problem since our disks often exceed 2 TB.
> Failing to go above 2 TB is okay given the nature of MBR, but preventing
> the disk from being usable is different. Zigo / Julien / *, is there any
> change you could get the fixed upstream version into jessie and
> wheezy-backports soon?
>
> Note this bug is in no way GCE-specific, even though I noticed it in
> that context.
>
> - Jimmy
Jimmy,
At this point in time, just right before the freeze, I think it's best
to just backport the fix. So I've cloned upstream BZR repository to have
a look at the commits. And version 0.27 is very different from version
0.26, so it'd be hard to backport the fix. However, you may have noticed
that the fix isn't great anyway: it just limits the resize to 2TB,
leaving the rest of the HDD as unused (well, of course, because the MBR
doesn't support it, you'd need GPT support for that...).
So at the end, I'm not sure I want to this kind of dangerous work just
right before the freeze. I'd prefer to mark this as a known issue, and
make sure our users don't use HDD size >= 2TB, which is useless anyway
with the current state of cloud-utils.
Though, one interesting feature of cloud-utils 0.27 is that it seems it
now can handle GPT partition tables. Which would be a nice thing to
have, but really, just right before the freeze, I think it's too
dangerous to do an update, especially considering that it still has open
bugs, and that we wont have time to do enough testing.
Your thoughts?
Cheers,
Thomas Goirand (zigo)
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