Bug 758878

(In reply to comment #0)
> As discussed in Bug 757106, it is often useful in virtualized environments to
> write partitions directly to the raw disk devices exposed to the VM by the
> host.

Partitions do not exist without a partition table (aka disklabel). What you are describing is creating filesystems on unpartitioned disks.

Please remind me why you cannot create a disklabel on the device.

> Because it fails in "Automatic Partitioning Errors", I don't think there are
> logs.

There are always logs.

> 
> This is the correct thing to do for normal installs, so it probably should be a
> configurable option somewhere.

I'm not sure where you got that notion from, but it is incorrect.

(In reply to comment #1)
> Partitions do not exist without a partition table (aka disklabel). What you are
> describing is creating filesystems on unpartitioned disks.

Correct.

> Please remind me why you cannot create a disklabel on the device.

If the device has no disklabel on it, we can interact with the underlying LV in the host VM without having to use kpartx in order to read the partition table.  We can and do have disklabels on our devices right now, but this treated more as a wart than expected behavior.

> > Because it fails in "Automatic Partitioning Errors", I don't think there are
> > logs.
> 
> There are always logs.

Where are they stored? (certainly not on the disk, which it failed to partition.) If there are logs, I guess they would have to be captured using remote logging?

> > This is the correct thing to do for normal installs, so it probably should be a
> > configurable option somewhere.
> 
> I'm not sure where you got that notion from, but it is incorrect.

I think there is a slight misunderstanding here: the "correct thing" is to error when we discover no disklabel on a partition. That is to say, if I am installing a Fedora machine on some physical hardware, it's reasonable for the installer to get confused if /dev/sda has no disklabel on it.

So, what is being said here, is that *removing* these checks probably isn't a good idea, because they are usually correct. The request is to allow these checks to be disabled, if the user knows what they are doing.

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