From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4.2) Gecko/20040301 Description of problem: When making VFAT or MSDOS or JFS or REISER or XFS Filesystems on a system that supports these types, the mkfs app returns an error stating that it does not know the Drive Geometry. lvmguy confirmed this. I know that these FS types are not supported in RHEL3, but I am unable to find the proper OS version in the bugzilla create form :-( Hoping this will at least keep track of this issue. BTW, ext3 and ext2 both work fine. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.create LV 2.try and create one of the FS's above 3. Additional info:
So we probably ought to supply a fake geometry.
An option is now available upstream to specify what drive geometry you want a given dm device to return: dmsetup setgeometry. If no geometry was supplied zeros are returned, as per the man page. In Fedora/RHEL5 but it has not been backported to RHEL4.