Declarative partitioning with systemd-repart/growfs/makefs

[Mic92]

Currently we are still manually partition block devices and formatting them with filesystems. However with systemd 245 there is support for declarative disk management. The question is do we need anything beyond a simple module + documentation to support this feature?

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-repart.html#
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-growfs.html#

[flokli]

I think we already have a lot of manual code doing this in bash in stage2. If #72401 is done, we could move all this logic to native implementations.

[flokli]

Thinking about it again, we might even be able to do this before we have systemd-in-initrd - depends on when mountpoints made withautoFormat need to be available.

Related: #41180

[stale]

I marked this as stale due to inactivity. → More info

[srhb]

Still relevant to me.

[stale]

I marked this as stale due to inactivity. → More info

[emilazy]

(I wish you could mark an issue as "never stale")

[xaverdh]

I think one issue is that systemd-repart only supports gpt?

[emilazy]

I think it’s fine for new, optional features to only support GPT disks, which have many advantages over MBR anyway and work with both UEFI and legacy BIOS systems.

[xaverdh]

(I wish you could mark an issue as "never stale")

Or maybe the stale bot should implement some form of exponential backoff?

So when should systemd-repart be run? From stage-2 (or initrd even), or when the system is running?

[flokli]

Linking #74842 (comment), as it seems to be related.

[flokli]

Also related, #120015 adds systemd-makefs to initrd

[weilbith]

This is exactly the feature I'm searching for. Looking forward to get this closed. 🤗

[stale]

I marked this as stale due to inactivity. → More info

[blitz]

Is this solved with image.repart: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/modules/image/repart.md ?

/cc @nikstur

[nikstur]

I believe this was solved with general systemd-repart support introduce in #214396
growfs and makefs were already supported before. @Mic92 please re-open if you thought about something different.