From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20021003 Description of problem: vgscan can create very large files in /etc/lvmtab.d and /etc/lvmconf. The 700Kb that are free when the installer starts aren't quite enough for a 4 PV 227.36GB volume group configuration file, that takes more than 1 MB. Even for a smaller 2 PV 64 GB volume group, if you happen to run vgscan by hand in the shell and then tweak some partitions, you'll probably fill in the root filesystem of the installer generating very odd crashes in anaconda (IO exceptions for disk full), or RPM errors while installing packages. I've verified that adding more 5MB of /dev/zero to the uncompressed initrd.img adds about 1 Kb to the compressed initrd file. Can we afford to take up more 5 MB of memory with a larger initrd.img? The alternative I came up with to get the installer to not crash was to create an ext2 filesystem in /dev/ram, copy the contents of /etc into it then remount it atop /etc (or just bind /etc to it). Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Sometimes Steps to Reproduce: 1.Start the installer on a pre-installed, relatively large LVM-enabled system 2.Go to the shell virtual terminal and run df -k / 3.Proceed to the disk druid screen Actual Results: The free space in / decreases significantly. du -k /etc shows a lot of it is taken by /etc/lvmtab.d and /etc/lvmconf. Expected Results: We shouldn't get close to no free space in / Additional info: Removing drivers from /tmp after they're loaded helps make room for the lvm config files, but it's not quite enough for the installation to complete, not even in the smaller system. On the larger system, the system won't even recognize the pre-installed system and the existing volume group.
Still present in phoebe 2.
Added 2 megs for now. Hope to come up with something better before the final release, but if not, we have a stopgap.
The additional 2MB seem to have been enough, even for an install on machines with a 230GB VG with 4MB extents and 300GB VG with 8MB extents.
This is going to have to be good enough for now.