On 24/10/2014 2:59 PM, Orion Poplawski wrote: > On 10/23/2014 09:05 PM, Steven Haigh wrote: >> On 24/10/2014 1:59 PM, Orion Poplawski wrote: >>> On 10/22/2014 03:23 PM, Steven Haigh wrote: >>>> Hi all, >>>> >>>> I'm wondering - I'm looking to simplify my Xen DomU installation via a >>>> kickstart file... >>>> >>>> As my Xen config has /dev/xvda - which should be formatted as ext4 and >>>> used as / - is there any options that I can achieve this? >>>> >>>> Just about everything I've stumbled across does partitioning first - >>>> and >>>> not the entire disk. Without supplying a kickstart file, the installer >>>> will bail saying no disks found. >>>> >>>> It's been this way for MANY years, but I heard rumours of a magical >>>> kickstart option - but I can't seem to find it... >>>> >>> >>> What do you have against partitioning the disk? Loosing the 512-bytes >>> for the partition table? >> >> On some setups it can cause major write degradations in the virtual >> machine. >> >> If you can imaging the disk being set up in 4Kb clusters - which LVM >> then adheres to - but on the DomU disk with a partition, the alignment >> for partition data is now 0 + 512 bytes instead of 0. >> >> This means a write of 4Kb would write two sectors to the physical disk >> (first being 512 bytes + 4Kb, the second being the 512 bytes that give >> us an offset). >> >> In lame ASCII art, this means: >> >> Plain Disk: >> 0-----------512-----------1024-----------1536-----------2048 etc >> Whole disk write: >> ----------------------------------------------------------> to 4Kb >> Partitioned disk write: >> [ part tbl ]--------------------------------------------> to 4Kb + 512 >> bytes >> >> Its good to get your sectors aligned.... Especially when its on a RAID >> backend that also has a stripe size as well... >> > > Hmm, that is an issue. I assume you've tried: > > part / --onpart /dev/xvda > > You may also be able to partition in %pre manually with GPT or dos with > your desired alignment.
For the record, I did manage to get this going: ## Wipe the disk completely and use the whole disk in ext4 config. zerombr clearpart --all --drives=xvda part / --fstype="ext4" --onpart=xvda --label=root bootloader --location=none One point though is that you have to make your own 'grub.conf' for Xen to use in booting the system. This isn't really an issue though - because you only need a template - the kernel updates will update the template once created. Now I've got it happening ok - its actually quicker to do a KS install than it was to untar my xz archive of a template system :) > Having tried using full disk for things like md raid and lvm in the past > an gotten burned by loosing most autodetection I've given up on not > partitioning. Heh - I'm the other way :) -- Steven Haigh Email: net...@crc.id.au Web: http://www.crc.id.au Phone: (03) 9001 6090 - 0412 935 897
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