When doing testing of the anaconda patches for RHEL-4 virtio, I found that virtio disks do not properly re-scan the partition table after changing it. This is because a virtio disk shows up as "unknown" in RHEL-4 parted, and subsequently parted decides not to do the rescan. The solution here will probably be to introduce a new VIRTIO disk type to RHEL-4 virtio so it will properly re-scan the disk.
Created attachment 328734 [details] Patch to add a new PED_VIRTIO_DISK type to parted With this patch in place, along with all of the other dependent patches hanging off of BZ 446215, I was able to successfully install a RHEL-4 guest to an unpartitioned raw disk over virtio devices. This patch is a little bit ugly in that it uses fopen("/proc/devices") to do it's work, but I don't have a better way to accomplish that at present; virtio_blk devices are allocated dynamically, so we can't do a simple test. Note that this patch is not in upstream parted; there, if an "unknown" disk comes up, it runs the partition re-scan unconditionally, so it is not needed. Given the age of RHEL-4's parted, though, I thought it would be safer to introduce a new PED_VIRTIO_DISK type instead.
This request was evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for inclusion, but this component is not scheduled to be updated in the current Red Hat Enterprise Linux release. If you would like this request to be reviewed for the next minor release, ask your support representative to set the next rhel-x.y flag to "?".
This should be available on parted-1.6.19-23.EL.
Install with: # qemu-kvm -drive file=/root/kvm.img,if=virtio,boot=on -net nic,model=virtio,macaddr=00:16:41:E4:1D:FF,vlan=0 -net tap,script=/etc/qemu-ifup,vlan=0,ifname=vnet0 -m 512 -cdrom /root/boot.iso -boot d Default partitioning, default package set - PASS Disk is seen as /dev/vda. I'm moving this one to VERIFIED. Please move back to ON_QA if more testing is needed.
An advisory has been issued which should help the problem described in this bug report. This report is therefore being closed with a resolution of ERRATA. For more information on therefore solution and/or where to find the updated files, please follow the link below. You may reopen this bug report if the solution does not work for you. http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHEA-2009-0979.html