[rhelv6-beta-list] How can I align the boundary of partition / LVM / FS within the kickstart script?

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Sun, Aug 22, 2010 at 4:29 AM, Kirby Zhou <kirbyzhou at sohu-rd.com> wrote:
> How can I align the boundary of partition / LVM / FS within the kickstart
> script?
>
> There are 3 case which we need align with:
>
> 1.      The new 4k sector-size hard disk.
> 2.      The strip size of a RAID array.
> 3.      The block size of SSD erasing.
>
> But the anaconda always align partitions with 63.5kib, and set the size of
> LVM header to 192kib.
> How can I do something to adjust it?

I've encountered, headlong, similar issues with NFS images from a
NetApp for VMware clients. The upstream NetApp has 4096 byte blocks on
its native hardware, but there is no graceful way to inform the VMware
clients that they should treat the NFS mounted filesystem images from
the NetApp as 4096 byte block based. The result is chaos for the
NetApp, trying to re-align all this traffic, because the "63-block"
space assigned for MBR's and partitions for "msdos compatibility"
means most if not all all of the partitions wind up misaligned.

I've submitted bug reports and RFE's for RHEL 5, and submitted '%pre'
scripts to pre-align designated partitions and then use '--onpart'
options for kickstart to use the existing partitions without
rebuilding or re-aligning them. It's quite painful to do: it's not
manageable or feasible with fdisk, you need to use parted. (Not
gparted! The gnome parted graphical tool lacks access ot the block
selection options for beginning partitions for the underlying 'parted'
tool.)

It has to be done as a '%pre' operation, because /mnt/sysimage is
still mounted recording logs at the '%post' step and is not easily
released for re-partitioning. If you'd like copies of my tools, I'll
be happy to post them or send them to you personally.