BTRFS postdownloadscript

[mstabrin]

@Tom-Elliott I have to thank you for the fast response
I will keep the modifications intact for now and when I encounter problems using it I will come back to you

[Sebastian Roth]

@mstabrin said in BTRFS postdownloadscript:

I will keep the modifications intact for now and when I encounter problems using it I will come back to you

Just wondering if you had time to test this and encountered any issue so far?

It’s part of the official code and will be in the next release. So it would be good to have some confidence this is working as expected.

Thanks in advance!

[mstabrin]

Hello @sebastian-roth ,

So far I did not encounter any problems imaging and deploying resizable BTRFS images

However, I “only” tested simple examples, i.e., one SSD with EFI, BTRFS, SWAP partitioning.

But no problems with this setup.
However, more complex examples will follow soon and I will come back to you in case I encounter some problems.

[mstabrin]

@Tom-Elliott @george1421 @Sebastian-Roth A quick follow up, so I deployed the image to many different PCs now and so far I did only have minor issues which might not actually be related to BTRFS in the first place.

I used to have the partition order:

1. EFI
2. BTRFS
3. SWAP 2GB
   on a VM with a 50GB HDD.

Image options: Single Disk - Resizable - Everything

Everything worked great if I deployed to HDDs with >=50GB.
However, it failed when I tried the deployment to an HDD with 40GB.

It seemed to be something like: The SWAP starting block on the original HDD is on a starting block that is not even present on the 40GB HDD.

So I moved the partition order to:

1. EFI
2. SWAP 2GB
3. BTRFS

And everything works as intended.

I will play around with different approaches though.
Like separate the partitioning from the actual image deployment.
We have many different systems requiring different amounts of SWAP space and/or dual/triple/many boot.
So my idea would be to deploy the partitioning first and afterwards only image the BTRFS partition itself and distribute it to a specified aim partition on the aim PC.

Thanks again for the help!

[Sebastian Roth]

@mstabrin Good to hear the BTRFS resize code is working for you! Thanks again for your work on this.

For a long time FOG would not move partitions if they were recognized as “fixed” because moving e.g. a recovery partition in the old MBR days would render it useless because of static sector addressing in boot loaders and such. Now as we all move towards UEFI and GPT partition layouts we have updated this logic to handle “fixed” partitions as fixed in size but not fixed in position anymore. For more details read this topic: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/15025/move-partitions-on-gpt-layouts-need-people-to-test

I did a test with Linux partition layout having SWAP at the end and it was able to shrink it down and deploy to a smaller size disk: https://forums.fogproject.org/post/141373

To make a long story short, download the latest inits from our webserver (64 bit, 32 bit) and you should have this feature included as well as your BTRFS resize.