Jan, My responses below are from testing performed today against Solaris 98 and my modified auto-install and liborchestrator.
jan damborsky wrote: > Hi William, > > the overall document looks pretty good, > I have only couple of questions/comments - > please see below. > > Thank you, > Jan > > Slice and partition management actions > -------------------------------------- > * Partition > Will be starting offset required ? What happens > is the partition overlaps the exiting one ? There is currently little checking at this layer. If overlapping occurs, fdisk fails, the error message is logged, an error code returned, and AI fails. > > I might recommend to support similar approach which > is to be taken for slices - specify only partition > size or allow AI to pick up the largest contiguous > chunk of available space. This would indeed be simpler, but in the little time remaining before the release, we might avoid this change and require the user to specify the starting sector and size for both creation and deletion. The user can also use other partitioning tools for this preview release. > > > Defining desired behavior > ------------------------- > * <target_device_use_solaris_partition> = false > > - partition information specified > What would be the format of partition information ? > Is user requested to specify complete partition > information - what is optional, what is mandatory ? The AI engine manifest should include this information for partitions: action = create or delete partition number (currently ignored) starting sector size in sectors partition type (currently ignored - creates Solaris only) For both creation and deletion, the starting sector and size only are used. To delete a partition, there must be an exact match on starting sector and size, or an error will be returned and the installation will terminate. Here is a sample of the AI engine manifest for a partition: <ai_device_partitioning> <partition_action>create</partition_action> <partition_number>1</partition_number> <partition_start_sector>200</partition_start_sector> <partition_size>20480</partition_size> <partition_type>99</partition_type> </ai_device_partitioning> Testing reveals that any partition information missing will cause a manifest verification failure (as well as a core dump in the version I'm working on). This includes information that is ignored by the partition editing code I've written. Since for the November release, the user edits the AI engine manifest by hand, we should remove the fields that are required but ignored from the sample template, and to remove the requirement from the manifest parser. > > - no partition information > I might recommend not to take 'whole disk' as > default if no partition information is specified. > This seems dangerous - I think that if user wants > to wipe out all the disk, it should be explicitly > stated in the manifest. Opinions from anyone else? > > Current behavior > ---------------- > Only to confirm - it seems this section describes current > implementation in AI - might it be correct ? Yes, we're talking about AI and code that is under development but not yet in the repo. > > To be done for November > ----------------------- > - What will be implemented as far as creating Solaris2 > partition is concerned ? The plan is only to create Solaris2 partitions with create and delete actions, as described above. The current code supports this. > > - With respect to minimum and recommended sizes, they > are slightly different comparing with the ones > in GUI installer. > > The reason is that we don't have /.image_info file for > AI, which might tell us, how much space is needed for > installation. > Current behavior is that if this information is not > available defaults are picked up by the orchestrator: > 4GiB for minimum, ~12GiB for recommended. Sundar indicated that this will not be added for November. There is a field in the AI engine manifest of minimum device size (as opposed to partition size) that is used in criteria checking. > > - Switching to read_extvtoc() and write_extvtoc() will > allow to install on <1TB; 2TB) disks. Only 2TB will > be usable on >2TB disks. OK. There are existing OpenSolaris bugs with terabyte disks that can hopefully be fixed by the release. William > > > > William Schumann wrote: >> Slice (VTOC) and partition (fdisk) management for the Automated >> Installer have not yet been specified, yet safe and sensible behavior >> is expected. >> >> I have prepared a document (attached) with the following objectives: >> - document the expected features and behavior >> - document the current behavior >> - document what is yet to be coded >> - serve as a starting point so we may achieve consensus on what the >> proper behavior should be >> >> Please review the the attached document and comment. Check my >> assumptions, offer corrections and suggestions. >> William >> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> >> _______________________________________________ >> caiman-discuss mailing list >> caiman-discuss at opensolaris.org >> http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/caiman-discuss >
