Failure to expand shrunken resizeable image from Linux machines

[george1421]

For the next test I spun up a 50GB ubuntu image (knowing the default layout is on lvm) and captured that. We all know since the disk layout is LVM FOG will capture the lvm partition as raw even for single disk resizable. That means the LVM partition is not resizable from within FOS at this point.

Here is the ubuntu reference image layout

Here is the ubuntu image deployed to a larger hard drive (65GB target vs 50GB reference image) target computer.

Here is the results of trying to deploy a 50GB captured image to a 25GB target computer:

[Xipher]

@tom-elliott I’ll give it a shot today

Going to post up the screenshots of the output in the same style everyone else is first though to try and help explain and identify the original issue better, want to try and make sure everyone is on the same page by using the same style of output.

[Xipher]

Ok, want to break down the results in the same sort of output I’m seeing used here for the source and destination of each attempt

Destination is always a 75gb machine which is always a bigger disk. The ‘smaller disk’ restore issue I think is already identified?

This is the ‘custom’ partitioned layout I was using yesterday which caused a problem:

Source:

Destination:

This is the ‘default’ layout Mint Mate 18.2 produces from its installer when LVM is selected:

Source:

Destination:

This is the ‘working’ solution wherein the root partition is the first partition on the drive:

Source:

Destination:

Something I noticed on all the machines though was that the SWAP partition ONLY mounted on the LVM destination machine…!? All other attempts without LVM lead to the destination machine not mounting its swap, really weird…

Hope this helps understand what I’m running into and I’ll try the patched init today, though I have to run off for a bit at the moment, sorry!

[Tom Elliott]

@xipher I believe the swap mount is unrelated to where the partition actually sits, rather Linux Mint seems to set the swap by uuid. While we do try to reset the UUID, this isn’t working and I’m not overly worried about fixing the UUID for SWAP partitions anyway. (Why you ask?) Because you can edit the /etc/fstab, change the swap partition from the UUID to the actual location. In my case /dev/sda5 is the drive, so replace the UUID bit with /dev/sda5 and all works properly on reboots.

[Xipher]

@tom-elliott Sorry it took so long, I put the new init in, but the results were identical sadly :C

Also, totally agree on the SWAP partition issue, its a change I’ll make on the client to capture.

[Tom Elliott]

@xipher what do you mean identical? Of course my test boxes are using the default layout of linux mint, but all are appropriately resizing where my tests yesterday before changes failed in almost the exact same way you described.

[Tom Elliott]

Also, you did update the init first? No need to rerun installer for these tests as it will write the “bad” inits if done.

[Xipher]

@tom-elliott

Ran the two commands in your prior post as root:

wget -O /var/www/fog/service/ipxe/init.xz https://fogproject.org/inits/init.xz
wget -O /var/www/fog/service/ipxe/init_32.xz https://fogproject.org/inits/init_32.xz

Recaptured all 3 images, then casted them to the test system one after the other and recorded the results.

Didn’t re-run the installer or anything else, system wasn’t rebooted, etc, pretty much just replaced the init per the above command provided, recaptured, recast.

I could try providing a VM image of one of the systems I’m capturing from that exhibits the issue? Could provide the actual images too.

[george1421]

I was just looking at my ubuntu example and I found something not right. The image is LVM so FOG can only copy that in raw mode. So no expansion can happen (this is A reason for using standard partitions). But when I went from a 50GB original image to a 65GB target computer is grew the /boot partition to by 15GB (the difference between 50 and 65). I would have thought that the /boot partition would be a fixed size partition (as with MS Windows). I created a new LM master image based on LVM and it happened the same as with ubuntu. My original intent was to have some extra space in the physical disk so I could test some LVM expansion tools.

Linux Mint with LVM defaults.

jondoe@jondoe-VirtualBox ~ $ lsblk
NAME                MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sr0                  11:0    1 1024M  0 rom  
sda                   8:0    0   65G  0 disk 
├─sda2                8:2    0    1K  0 part 
├─sda5                8:5    0 49.5G  0 part 
│ ├─mint--vg-swap_1 253:1    0    1G  0 lvm  [SWAP]
│ └─mint--vg-root   253:0    0 48.5G  0 lvm  /
└─sda1                8:1    0 15.5G  0 part /boot
jondoe@jondoe-VirtualBox ~ $ df -h
Filesystem                 Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev                       474M     0  474M   0% /dev
tmpfs                      100M  3.6M   96M   4% /run
/dev/mapper/mint--vg-root   48G  5.0G   41G  11% /
tmpfs                      496M  168K  496M   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs                      5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs                      496M     0  496M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda1                   15G   67M   15G   1% /boot
cgmfs                      100K     0  100K   0% /run/cgmanager/fs
tmpfs                      100M  4.0K  100M   1% /run/user/108
tmpfs                      100M   20K  100M   1% /run/user/1000
jondoe@jondoe-VirtualBox ~ $ 

[Xipher]

@george1421 Close to my findings wherein the first partition (sda1) will grow proportionally, but the rest… no go.

If you create the same layout but have the root partition where you currently have the boot partition, it will grow the root and ‘work’ as it seems it would be intended.

If you were to make a home partition in the same place, it would grow but not the boot or root… etc

[Tom Elliott]

@george1421 It only expands partitions that are “expandable” and not “fixed”. Meaning, if you have 1 ext4 partition, and it shrinks, (say boot here), it will try to expand the partitions somewhat evenly. However, this is not a perfect system, nor has it ever really been. I’ve tried for all I’m worth, but I’m only one man, sorry.

[Sebastian Roth]

Great you all have been heavily working on this. Looks like we are getting there although the initially posted disk layout (sda1=root, sda2=extended, sda5=swap) has changed. From the latest pictures posted it looks as if the expansion is still not working for this kind of layout (SWAP being on sda1).

I was just able to replicate this issue. But I didn’t have the time to find what’s causing the issue in our script:

$ cat in1.txt
label: dos
label-id: 0x77265efa
device: /dev/sda
unit: sectors

/dev/sda1 : start=        2048, size=     3940352, type=82, bootable
/dev/sda2 : start=     3942400, size=    69457920, type=5
/dev/sda5 : start=     3944448, size=     3940352, type=83
/dev/sda6 : start=     7886848, size=    65513472, type=83

$ ./procsfdisk.awk -v SECTOR_SIZE=512 -v CHUNK_SIZE=512 -v MIN_START=2048 -v action=filldisk -v target=/dev/sda -v sizePos=146800640 -v diskSize=146800640 -v fixedList=1:5 in1.txt 
ERROR: New start and size (150960130) on (/dev/sda1) is larger than the disk (146800640).
# ERROR in new partition table, quitting.
# ERROR: /dev/sda5 has an overlap.
label: dos
label-id: 0x77265efa
device: /dev/sda
unit: sectors

/dev/sda1 : start=        2048, size=     3940352, type=82, bootable
/dev/sda2 : start=     3944448, size=   142856192, type=5
/dev/sda5 : start=   142856194, size=     8103936, type=83
/dev/sda6 : start=   142856194, size=   134747648, type=83

From my point of view the output of sfdisk -d /dev/sda is much more helpful than df -h.

[Tom Elliott]

@sebastian-roth said in Failure to expand shrunken resizeable image from Linux machines:

./procsfdisk.awk -v SECTOR_SIZE=512 -v CHUNK_SIZE=512 -v MIN_START=2048 -v action=filldisk -v target=/dev/sda -v sizePos=146800640 -v diskSize=146800640 -v fixedList=1:5 in1.txt

Based on the most current this is what I see:

./procsfdisk.awk -v SECTOR_SIZE=512 -v CHUNK_SIZE=512 -v MIN_START=2048 -v action=filldisk -v target=/dev/sda -v sizePos=146800640 -v diskSize=146800640 -v fixedList=1:5 in1.txt
# Partition table is consistent.
label: dos
label-id: 0x77265efa
device: /dev/sda
unit: sectors

/dev/sda1 : start=        2048, size=     3940352, type=82, bootable
/dev/sda2 : start=     3944446, size=    71485442, type=5
/dev/sda5 : start=     3944448, size=     3940352, type=83
/dev/sda6 : start=     7884800, size=    67425792, type=83

[Sebastian Roth]

@Tom-Elliott Sorry, didn’t see that you pushed a new version. Confirmed that my error posted does not apply anymore! Looks good to me now.

Still I think about creating a testcases suite for the procsfdisk.awk script. So we could always check a lot of different layouts against the most current script to see if everything still works.

[Tom Elliott]

@sebastian-roth I agree, but data is hard to come by, and I don’t think we can come up with every case potential.

[george1421]

@xipher said in Failure to expand shrunken resizeable image from Linux machines:

@george1421 Close to my findings wherein the first partition (sda1) will grow proportionally, but the rest… no go.

If you create the same layout but have the root partition where you currently have the boot partition, it will grow the root and ‘work’ as it seems it would be intended.

If you were to make a home partition in the same place, it would grow but not the boot or root… etc

IMO In the case of Mint with the lvm. I would consider the /boot and [swap] partitions to be fixed in size. This would equate the System partition of Windows. In my ignorance I would have expected the disk layout to match the source image and have 15GB of air left in the target disk. Since LVM partition is copied as raw and both the /boot and [swap] were fixed.

My goal here was to see if I could come up with a way to extend the lvm disk.

[Tom Elliott]

@george1421 There’s already functions in place for the hopeful integration of LVM extending through fog (as well as imaging) though I’ve not made any major effort in actually getting this working. You’re more than welcome to have a go at it. The same resizing functions should work similarly. Would you be willing to re-update your init’s to the absolute latest using the same wget commands and seeing if things are a bit better for you?

[george1421]

@tom-elliott said in Failure to expand shrunken resizeable image from Linux machines:

I’ve tried for all I’m worth, but I’m only one man, sorry.

Tom, to be honest, as I posted before about 90% of the deployments are MS Windows, with about 8% Mac and the rest other bits (my feels like numbers). With MS doing its Win10 crap hopefully more will start to migrate to Linux based desktops. When issues arise you jump on them with both feet. The key is knowing about the issues to fix.

[george1421]

Just thinking about this. If it was me and I planned on deploying Linux client OS to target machines, I would not choose to use LVM (with expanding partitions or not). The issues is that FOG / partclone can only capture / deploy the image as raw. This is a slowest way of deploying the image. I would use native partitions on the disk.

Right now deploying that captured LM partition will take about 28 minutes to finish. The native partitions are much faster.

[Xipher]

@george1421 For my needs, I’m totally dropping LVM and agree, LVM really doesn’t seem to have a place in images at the moment.