[Bug 530071] Re: Lucid Default live-cd install fails with 4K sector / Advanced Format drives

[Colin Watson]

So, for the most part this is all obviously sensible.  The installer can
and should create partitions with optimal alignment (and I've made that
change, pending testing), and it makes complete sense for mkfs.ext4 to
complain when you do something that will result in poor performance.

The bit that is a little bit awkward is this: imagine that you take an
existing partition which was created before we fixed the partitioner to
deal with optimal alignment, and try to overwrite it with a new ext4
filesystem (which may seem to be a perfectly reasonable action to a user
unfamiliar with the minutiae of logical sector sizes).  mkfs.ext4 will
complain in the manner you describe, and there seems to be no
straightforward way to force it to proceed anyway (short of 'yes | ...',
which I don't think is acceptable!).  We should probably implement the
same check in the partitioner when we're about to create a new
filesystem, but if the user says that they don't want to move the start
of the filesystem, what are we to do?  Ideally we'd be able to run
mkfs.ext4 under the covers with a "yes, I know, just get on with it"
option.

Ted, would you be willing to make the alignment warning here overridable
using a command-line option?

-- 
Lucid Default live-cd install fails with 4K sector / Advanced Format drives
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/530071
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