On 02/04/2026 at 15:26, Marc Haber wrote:
On Thu, Apr 02, 2026 at 12:30:56PM +0200, Pascal Hambourg wrote:
If you are going to replace partman, you may need to perform the
following actions:
- load related installer components (e.g. lvm2-udeb)
- stop old LVM volumes and RAID arrays
- create partition tables
- set up LVM, software RAID, encryption...
- create filesystems and swaps
- mount filesystems on /target
- activate swaps
- create /target/etc/crypttab and /target/etc/fstab
- install filesystem and block layer packages in the target system
- set flag file /var/lib/partman/ignore_uefi for grub-installer
That's a bunch. But probably doable. Since the preseeded installer will
not track back and can abort in the error case, I wonder whether:
- the replacement could assume that there are no old LVM volumes and
software RAIDs started and whether
LVM logical volumes and software RAID arrays are normally started by
partman, so if partman is not started at all or not started before your
custom partitioning, you should not need to stop them.
- the installer really needs a swap partition. About 95 % of the servers
I have installed in my life run fine without swap.
The installer itself does not need swap, but if swap is created for the
target system then some installer components may need it to be activated
in order to properly configure the target system. For example
base-installer/bootstrap-base gets active swaps from /proc/swaps to
configure the resume device for the initramfs.
