Hi On Fri, Sep 26, 2025 at 03:49:50PM +0100, Henrik Morsing via GLLUG wrote: > On Fri, Sep 26, 2025 at 11:49:42AM +0000, Andy Smith via GLLUG wrote: > > Hi, > > > > It breaks things because the block device has signatures indicating > > multiple different things and udev picks the first one it finds (zfs in > > your case). So it carried on behaving as if you have a zfs device, not > > an ext filesystem. > > ZFS was actually the second entry. Either way, this is one of my biggest > gripes with open source and Linux, lack of co-ordination and no over-all > architect.
Well "open source" != "Linux" really, as the *BSD systems have
traditionally had a top-down "cathedral" approach (although I've not
used BSD for many years so don't know if that is still the case).
And closed source doesn't necessarily mean a well planned architecture
either (think of the many sudden changes in direction Microsoft have
made in Windows). And commercial companies can have much more heavily
entrenched silos than open source.
> Issues like this would not happen if there was a design people adhered to.
> But individual groups should also really pay more attention and be stricter
> in their designs.
>
> > I suppose diagnostics could be better somehow. Or mkfs tools could
> > detect leftover signatures and warn about them. I've had mkfs.btrfs do
> > that before.
>
> It could. Block devices, filesystems, mkfs tools, udev and the Debian
> installer should all follow an agreed design.
>
> If a device can have multiple signatures (but why?) then udev needs to search
> them all. I think udev is the biggest culprit here, and I might submit a bug
> report for this.
Well ZFS is already mentioned in this bug report (linked from your
Debian bug report):
https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues/3642
Which also links to this bug report:
https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues/3613
> However, mkfs should warn and when I choose "complete disk with
> auto-partitioning" in the Debian installer, it should start by wiping these
> signatures. I can still not quite get my head around how this signature ended
> up on a device that the Debian installer created though.
<snip>
It might be worthwhile putting in a feature request to have the Debian
installer run 'wipefs' before it runs the partitioning, although that
would only clear the problem for a single distribution.
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