On 26/09/16 03:16, Andreas Klauer wrote: > On Sun, Sep 25, 2016 at 10:16:24PM +0100, Wols Lists wrote: >> > I need to know what will happen if you give entire drives to mdadm. > Installers will pick unpartitioned disks first. Forget just trashing > the metadata, easy to accidentally write across the entire disk. > > This is what it looks like when installing Windows: http://imgur.com/a/GtcR2 > > Same can happen with Linux installers. Unpartitioned disks are just unusual. > > Not sure why this is a thing anyway. There's no downside to partitions. > Adds a safety margin, is yet another place that has metadata (with GPT > you can use mdnumber-role as partition name / partlabel), doesn't harm > performance in any way... Actually, there IS a downside, which is what I'm getting at. Bare metal -> partitions -> raid -> lvm -> partions ... I'm a DB guy by trade. I hate relational DBs with a vengeance - because they are necessarily complex thanks to relational theory but because they are also so totally UNnecessary if people weren't wedded to the (totally impractical in the real world) maths! I know what I'm doing here. I'm very bright. And I'm trying to work out how to explain myself without leaving your "bear of very little brain" in charge of sys-adminning a server scratching his head in confusion trying to work out what goes where. As far as linux is concerned, a block device is a block device. But the poor sysadmin has got to get his head round what goes where, and my experience with DBs tells me that most people probably aren't as bright as us ... At the end of the day, I don't want to recommend anything. I simply want to know - is it *possible*. Unfortunately, I don't have the hardware to try it myself :-( The setup I want to know is Bare metal -> raid [-> lvm] -> / Is there any room on the disk to install grub? (Note that - and I know you shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet - apparently Neil Brown prefers passing the entire unpartitioned disk to raid ...) Cheers, Wol -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
