Calamares Install Options

Development
1

I’ve been playing around with a scenario (using Grok to help me), and I’m stuck. I wanted to see if I could take a system installed with a btrfs partition that has two subvolumes, @/ and @/home, and install OpenMandriva on @/ without touching @/home.

This is a scenario I usually perform on ext4, but with separate partitions: blow away the partition containing /, keep /home, and distro hop without having to restore from a backup. I’ve done this before with Calameres, but I wanted to see if I could do it with btrfs (this is one of the things that keeps me from switching to btrfs).

So I installed Arch Linux using the archinstall installer in a VM and specified btrfs with subvolumes. The idea was to get that working and then try to install OpenMandriva on top of it by blowing away the @ subvolume and recreating it, without touching @home.

Unfortunately, Calameres doesn’t show the subvolumes at all so they can be dealt with separately. It’s either keep the partition or don’t. And if I tell it to keep the partition, the installer blows up with this error:

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Here’s the underlying error message:

[PYTHON JOB]: Found gettext "en_US.UTF-8" in
"/usr/share/locale/en_US.UTF-8"
chcon: failed to get security context of '/': Operation not supported
     .. Running QList("mount", "-t", "btrfs", "-o",
"defaults,noatime,compress=zstd:1,autodefrag", "/dev/vda2",
"/tmp/calamares-root-d5woo902/")
     .. Running QList("udevadm", "settle")
     .. Running QList("sync")
ERROR: Could not create subvolume: File exists
17:12:56 [1]: virtual JobResult Calamares::Python::Job::exec()
     ERROR: Error while running: CalledProcessError: Command '['btrfs',
'subvolume', 'create', '/tmp/calamares-root-d5woo902/@']' returned
non-zero exit status 1.

At:
   /usr/lib64/python3.11/subprocess.py(413): check_call
   /usr/lib64/calamares/modules/mount/main.py(292): mount_partition
   /usr/lib64/calamares/modules/mount/main.py(385): run

I’m curious: is this a Calameres limitation, or can its configuration be tweaked?

2

2 things:

  • btrfs support for install is fairly experimental.
  • You will probably need to change the UID and GID of your home directory depending on the distro you are doing this with because we don’t use the same defaults other distros use.
3

I do not usebtrfs myself.

  1. You can ask Calamares directly.

  2. Depending on what they say we can then look at whether this is/is not an OM issue.

  3. Then you probably need todo some testing. It would be helpful to get a few other users to help with this testing and reporting of whatever.

4

Will do. This is a low-priority experiment for me (I also do not use btrfs, but I have read that it can help SSDs and NVMes last longer). I was basically wondering if I did a new install and then borked the system and needed to do a new install, would my current strategy of separate / and /home partitions on ext4 work also with btrfs’s subvolumes, and allow me to install the OS without touching /home?

@zeroability I don’t think btrfs is experimental at this point, though. I remember trying it years ago and having problems with it (something to do with MySQL, if I remember correctly), but it’s probably been 7 or 8 years since then. It’s been the default on openSUSE for a long time. I think it’s also the default on Fedora and Manjaro.

I’m just goofing around, which is why I put this in Coffee Break (though somebody moved it; thanks!).

5

Definitely not an OpenMandriva thing; it’s a Calamares thing. Also, Fedora’s installer can’t do it either. Maybe the file system isn’t experimental (Wikipedia says it was declared stable in 2013; I think I originally tried it in 2016/2017), but various installers’ support for it with regard to subvolumes is not there yet.

6

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