Bug 752276

The error message states fairly clearly that the problem is you are activating one of the "Fill ..." options for your RAID partitions, which is only allowed if you are creating a RAID0 array. Since you are not creating a RAID0 array, you must specify the sizes of your member partitions as a FIXED SIZE. If this does not work for some reason, please provide the new error message you are presented with after making this adjustment.

The problem is two-fold.

(1) The error message is unclear.  It requires an internet
search leading to this bug to find out what's going on.

(2) The test is done in the wrong place.  My two partitions
*are* the same size, and would remain that way unless I added
another partition later.  It should do the test after all
user selection has finished and just before committing the
changes to disk.

I think the problem is larger: RHEL5 and RHEL6 allow this. What about RHEL7?

We have an IMHO fairly common setup: Our servers have 2 hard disks of equal size and we use MD software raid. So far (RHEL5, RHEL6) our kickstart file looks like this:


clearpart --all --initlabel

# Boot
part raid.01    --size 250     --asprimary     --ondrive=sda
part raid.02    --size 250     --asprimary     --ondrive=sdb

# Rest for System
part raid.03	--size=100     --grow 	       --ondrive=sda
part raid.04	--size=100     --grow 	       --ondrive=sdb

# Assembling
raid /boot --device md0 --level=1 raid.01 raid.02
raid pv.system --level=1 --device=md1 raid.03 raid.04

# LVM
volgroup vg_system --pesize=32768 pv.system
logvol swap --size=8192 --name=swap --vgname=vg_system
logvol /var --size=5120 --name=var --vgname=vg_system
logvol / --size=10240 --name=root --vgname=vg_system
logvol /data --size=100 --grow --name=data --vgname=vg_system

Now we have to add some code to *calculate* the disk and partition sizes for no apparent benefit.

Could you maybe reevaluate this issue to support this (IMHO common) scenario? Or is there a new way to tell anaconda to build this kind of layout?

Also, how would we support users migrating from RHEL6 to a future RHEL7? It seems to me that they would face the same issue as well.

(In reply to comment #2)
> The problem is two-fold.
> 
> (1) The error message is unclear.  It requires an internet
> search leading to this bug to find out what's going on.

Feel free to propose clearer language if you believe you have a strong grasp of what's wrong with the current message.

> (2) The test is done in the wrong place.  My two partitions
> *are* the same size, and would remain that way unless I added
> another partition later.  It should do the test after all
> user selection has finished and just before committing the
> changes to disk.

That might help you with the specific configuration you tried this time. What about the user who has created an LVM configuration on top of his/her RAID and then must go back and take the whole thing apart and then rebuild it because it happened that automatic partition led to different sized member partitions? They will be angrily filing bugs that we shouldn't have waited so long to warn them. (In the current anaconda code you cannot modify partitions if they are already part of a higher-level device.)

I just ran into this installing F17.  I would suggest that it would be clearer if the message said that at least one of the selected partitions was created with one of the fill options.  Or that one of the selected partitions was not created with a fixed size.  I had no idea what a growable member was until I used Google to find this bug.

i ran into this error message when i tried to create a LVM PV on a raid device which is on a raid1
this was with f17 anaconda

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