Open Stack

On Tue, Jun 14, 2016, at 07:36 PM, Tony Breeds wrote:
> Hi All,
>     I'd like to add GPT partitioning supporg to DIB.  My current
>     understanding is that the only partitioning in DIB currently is
>     provided by partitioning-sfdisk, which will not support GPT.
> 

This isn't made very clear by looking at the elements, but there are
actually two ways to partition images. There is the partitioning-sfdisk
element (which I am guessing is what you found) that partitions with
sfdisk. There is also the vm element which is the way most users
partition / create a bootloader for their images. The vm element uses
parted. There is also a patch up which adds GPT/UEFI support[1].

> My proposed solution is:
> 
> 1. Create a new element called partitioning-parted  that (surprise
> surprise)
>    uses parted to create the disk labal and partitions.  This would like
>    along
>    side partitioning-sfdisk but provide a somewhat compatible way

I'd still like to see this - it would be great to break the partitioning
bits out of the vm element and in to a partitioning-parted element which
the vm element depends on.

> 2. Teach partitioning-parted how to parse DIB_PARTITIONING_SFDISK_SCHEMA
> and
>    use parted to produce msdos disklabeled partition tables
> 3. Deprecate partitioning-sfdisk
> 4. Remove partitioning-sfdisk in line with thew std. deprecation process.

>From my cursory reading it seems like parted is the thing to use for
this and there's really no reason to chose sfdisk over parted? I don't
have a ton of knowledge about this, but if that is the case then I like
this plan. I definitely want to make sure that there's no reason a user
would prefer to use sfdisk over parted, though...

> 
> Does this sound like a reasonable plan?
> Yours Tony.

Something else worth mentioning is that Andreas has been working on some
refactoring of our block-device.d phase[2]. I think the changes your
looking for are mostly addressed in[1] but if you're hoping to do
something larger its probably good to make sure they align with Andreas'
goals.

1:
https://review.openstack.org/#/c/287784/22/elements/vm/block-device.d/10-partition
2: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/319591/