Description of problem: When a system has XFS file systems created with "ftype=0" attribute (e.g. system was installed with < RHEL 7.5) and file system hierarchy is split (e.g. /usr, /var, /var/log, ...), it's not possible to upgrade to RHEL 8.2 unless /var file system hosting /var/lib/leapp is extended by several Gigabytes. This is not acceptable since XFS file systems can be shrinked once extended afterwards. Example: Customer has /, /usr, /var, /var/log, /opt which is very common when sticking to STIG recommendations. These 5 file systems will require an additional 5 x 2GB (LEAPP_OVL_SIZE) = 10GB on /var to host the temporary disk images. Now say 2GB LEAPP_OVL_SIZE is not sufficient due to having many packages (e.g. "Server with GUI" installation was used), consuming a lot of space in /usr. With LEAPP_OVL_SIZE enlarged to 4GB (our usual recommendation), up to 20GB additional space on /var must be needed to host the temporary disk images. There are multiple solutions to this issue: Solution 1: be able to specify LEAPP_OVL_SIZE variable per XFS file system (some file systems do not require much disk image) This solution would be suitable when Volume Group has not much free space and /var cannot be extended much more. Solution 2: create a temporary file system mounted on /var/lib/leapp to host the disk images This solution would be suitable when Volume Group / local disk has enough free space to hold a new volume until the upgrade is completed. The customer can then trash the temporary file system once upgrade finished.
The original solution has been redesigned and should be fixed by upstream PR: https://github.com/oamg/leapp-repository/pull/1097 All created OVL images are represented by sparse-files now. All systems originally affected by this ticket will consume just a fraction of original requriements - approx 128 MB per partition/volume specified in fstab. This value could be possibly yet lowered, but for now let's go with this.
This is affecting RHEL 8 to RHEL 9 as well.