Re: how to tell when biosboot partition is needed?

Thanks!

I mulled over the sources but didn't find the indicators for the final
selection of gpt over msdos as partition table label.

I'm not giving up yet :-)
Richard

On 10.08.12 23:41, Steve Rikli wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 09:57:26PM +0200, Richard Neuboeck wrote:
>> Hi List,
>>
>> I'm in the same predicament as Steve. My manual test installs of
>> Fedora 17 result in msdos and gpt partition table labels. Since I'm
>> using kickstart and a pre install script to partition the disc I would
>> also like to find a way to determine if a biosboot partition is
>> necessary or not.
>>
>> The only sure reason to install a biosboot partition I could find was
>> a disc >= 3TB.
>>
>> The UEFI test system I'm using definitely has UEFI enabled and since
>> the disc has 3TB should use EFI. But I couldn't find efi in sysfs like
>> anaconda tries to do to determine if it's an EFI capable system.
>> However this system gets a gpt label in my tests. But I don't know how
>> anaconda comes to that conclusion.
> 
> I never heard/found any tips or other ideas, and I couldn't follow how
> Anaconda decides what to do either; so I simply started grep'ing around
> during a live %pre session to see what I could find.
> 
> I came across /tmp/storage.log , which among many other things had a line
> like this:
> 
>     storage: registered device format class BIOSBoot as biosboot
> 
> which was about the only reference I could find to "biosboot" in the
> live Kickstart session.  I was thinking there might be something in
> /proc/ or /sys/ or thereabouts, but found nothing I could make use of.
> 
> In any case, my %pre disk partitioning script looks for that string, and
> if found then it adds an entry for a biosboot partition similar to:
> 
>     part biosboot --size 1 --fstype biosboot
> 
> This method has the advantage of being independent of disk size, and
> also doesn't perform additional partitioning actions on older releases
> where /tmp/storage.log reports nothing about biosboot.  So I can keep
> using the same %pre script to partition old & new Fedoras, CentOS, etc.
> 
> The obvious peril is Fedora may change/move/etc. the string in some future
> version of Anaconda, so I still occasionally keep an eye out for something
> a bit more programmatic/definitive; we'll see how well it holds up.
> 
> Cheers,
> sr.
> 
> 
>> So right now I'm only relying on the disk size to choose the partition
>> layout in my preinstall script.
>>
>> Any pointers where I can find more details or information on how to
>> make an educated guess on how to partition would be very welcome.
>>
>> Thanks!
>> Richard
>>
>>
>> On 09.06.12 01:00, Steve Rikli wrote:
>>> Is there some programmatic way within Kickstart %pre to determine
>>> if a "biosboot" partition is needed, or at least if it is an
>>> available option/fstype?
>>>
>>> Like many folks, we create a "/tmp/partitions.inc" sort of
>>> %include file in %pre, to partition the disk.
>>>
>>> Starting in Fedora16 a "part biosboot ..." partition is required, 
>>> and ideally we'd like to be able to use the same %pre script to 
>>> setup partitions on all the different Linux versions we need.
>>>
>>> We would be okay with "wasting" 1MB and always creating a biosboot 
>>> partition for any Linux, but it's not a supported type prior to 
>>> Fedora16, so that isn't an option.
>>>
>>> Thanks, sr.
>>>
> 
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