Bug 219878

Summary: no extra home partition for smaller disks
Product: [openSUSE] openSUSE 10.2 Reporter: Olaf Hering <ohering>
Component: YaST2Assignee: Lukas Ocilka <locilka>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact: E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity: Enhancement    
Priority: P5 - None CC: aj, lslezak
Version: Beta 2   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: PowerPC   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Found By: Development Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---

Description Olaf Hering 2006-11-10 15:01:23 UTC
10.2b2 
default install with gnome on apple.suse.de

during login, gnome keeps crashing.

after further investigation, the default install on a 9G drive created a 3.4G root and a 4.6G home partition.
After the install was done, 3.2G on the root partition were used. An user is not allowed to create files there.

yast gave no obvious hint that the default partition proposal will have not enough space for the selected patterns.
Maybe the partitioner should just not propose /home on drives smaller than 18G?
Comment 1 Olaf Hering 2006-11-10 15:10:32 UTC
sda had no partition table btw, I used the partition defaults.
Comment 2 Stefan Hundhammer 2006-11-13 11:10:43 UTC
For one thing, you will get plenty of warnings if you fill up your disk like that: From the pattern selector dialog as well as from the package selector dialog. Not only will you see bright red percentage bars for the partitions you fill up like that, you will also get pop-up warnings if you fill any partition over 90% and that remaining 10% are less than 400 MB. It is the user's choice to ignore that warning if he wants to override that.

This behaviour is well tested.

3.2 out of 3.4 GB is too much. But still, if Gnome crashes in this situation, this is clearly a Gnome problem: 200 MB free disk space on the root partition should be plenty.
Comment 3 Olaf Hering 2006-11-13 11:55:14 UTC
this one is about the /home partition.
Comment 4 Stefan Hundhammer 2006-11-13 13:17:22 UTC
A separate home partition was a feature requested by PM - and a very, very useful feature, too. Users had wanted that since mid-2000. This is the only way to reinstall without losing all data. And 9 GB are really plenty of hard disk space to have a separate /home partition. So the original intent of this report is INVALID: There clearly should be a separate /home partition for this particular case. If the root file system barely fits on the hard disk, this is another matter: I assume (didn't test it) that the partitioning proposal doesn't offer a /home partition in that case.

I don't know how much free disk space for the root file system the current partitioning proposal reserves; it could probably be more. This part would be an ENHANCEMENT for yast2-storage.

But still, if Gnome doesn't work with "only" 200 MB of free space in the root file system, this is clearly a Gnome bug.
Comment 5 Thomas Fehr 2006-11-13 13:27:09 UTC
Separate /home was a requested feature.
The size limits when YaST2 starts to suggest a separate /home is configurabe 
in control.xml. Values in control.xml are determined by PM not by me. 
I see no bug anywhere.
Comment 6 Andreas Jaeger 2006-11-13 18:19:48 UTC
Let's increase the limit so that we have at least 5 GB in the root partition.
Comment 8 Thomas Fehr 2006-11-13 18:51:57 UTC
These variables are pretty well documented in 
/usr/share/doc/packages/yast2-storage/config.xml.description of package
yast2-storage-devel.rpm.

I would suggest to increasing limit_try_home to 7G or 8G (this is 14G for SLED) 
and increasing root_base_size to 5G. 
But only chnage this for SL not for SLES/SLED.
Comment 9 Lukas Ocilka 2006-11-14 12:28:50 UTC
Index: control.openSUSE.xml
===================================================================
--- control.openSUSE.xml        (revision 34380)
+++ control.openSUSE.xml        (working copy)
@@ -32,9 +32,9 @@
     <partitioning>
         <evms_config config:type="boolean">true</evms_config>
         <try_separate_home config:type="boolean">true</try_separate_home>
-        <limit_try_home>5G</limit_try_home>
+        <limit_try_home>7G</limit_try_home>
         <root_space_percent>40</root_space_percent>
-        <root_base_size>3G</root_base_size>
+        <root_base_size>5G</root_base_size>
         <root_max_size>20G</root_max_size>
        <proposal_lvm>false</proposal_lvm>
        <proposal_evms>false</proposal_evms>

Anybody can change the control file :)
http://pdb.suse.de/index.pl?Package=skelcd-control-openSUSE&Release=10
nevertheless I'm responsible for that ;)

--- cut ---
- Changes in openSUSE control file (#219878):
  * limit_try_home: 5 GB -> 7 GB
  * root_base_size: 3 GB -> 5 GB
--- cut ---

Will be in build soon...