I am having trouble installing openSUSE 16 on a RAID 1 setup. I found a post here describing a workaround where you set up the RAID via the console first and then mount a separate /boot/efi, but Agama fails significantly here. Sometimes it shows drives under “Storage,” but most of the time it just throws an error: “unable to modify the settings.”
Ever since Grub2 became capable of booting from RAIDs, I have used the following setup:
/dev/md0 → /boot/efi (FAT32)
/dev/md1 → / (BTRFS)
/dev/md2 → /home (BTRFS)
I have been using this configuration since openSUSE 14.0. Prior to that, I kept Grub on a simple partition that was mirrored to the second disk manually. However, that often caused issues if a drive failed or if I forgot to copy the updated bootloader files to the second partition during an update.
For about a year now, this configuration has even been running on a hybrid RAID (NVMe + HDD; works great if you set the HDD to writemostly).
I understand that YaST is aging and needed to be replaced. What I don’t understand is why functionalities were removed in favor of an installation routine that feels like it represents SuSE 6.0, offering almost no configuration options. I also don’t understand why Agama only showed the disks once and consistently returns a storage error on all subsequent attempts.
Is there a solution for this other than waiting for 16.1? Are there plans to implement proper RAID support during the installation process?
I think focus is on this (profile) method for automation rather than a normal user install. I suspect it will come, just takes time… I’ve not had an issue with using mdadm in a Agama shell, but not mixing storage types either…
How is the HDD option set (hdparm) as you may need to do this in the Agama shell as well?
A rescan didn’t help. In the meantime, I can see the partitions in Agama and I’ve managed to start 16. However, the support here still leaves much to be desired. Interestingly, it is not possible to expand a btrfs partition on a RAID after the fact; Vulkan drivers aren’t working, and Pacman is only available via a workaround. Steam runs, but without Vulkan drivers… I have the feeling we are still dealing with an alpha version here.
The error seems to be caused by remnants on the disk; after running wipefs, it was recognized by AGAMA. However, a complete ‘no-go’ is that AGAMA fails to install Grub on a RAID.
What do you mean by the HDD options? Partitioning is done via the Rescue Console using parted, or are you referring to the mixed RAID environment? The writemostly parameter is an old relic in MDADM from the days when disks were mirrored over slow links. You can either pass it via MDADM (--write-mostly) or set it later on a mounted RAID: echo writemostly > /sys/block/mdx/md/dev-xxx/state.
Wirte-Mostly is stored inside the superblock of the mdadm device.
Found an error with Vulkan. Since a black screen occurred during installation, I had to boot the kernel with the ‘nomodeset’ parameter. This was the only way to get Leap 16 to boot without a black screen. However, using ‘nomodeset’ resulted in the NVIDIA repository not being installed automatically. It has to be added manually because it doesn’t appear in the community repositories list yet, which ultimately led to a faulty Vulkan installation.
Resize RAID: The installation routine attempted to create an additional partition table on the RAID device, adding yet another partitioning layer that made the whole setup unnecessarily complex.
I assume that Leap 16 will become interesting once the community repositories (like Packman) are fully ready and NVIDIA appears in the selection list. I am also still seeing dependency errors even within the standard openSUSE packages. For example, Cockpit is still reporting a conflict with another package.
Not sure if it helps as an idea, I had 1 system with a different setup and I could simply not get it to work with the 16 installer, so I ended up doing a clean 15 install and from there the cli to upgrade to 16. I know it sounds lame but in the end I worked. Hopefully 16.1 installer will be closer to what yast could do.
Thanks, I ran right into that exact error. The upgrade works as suggested, even with /boot/efi on a RAID 0. However, I ran into a few more issues since I didn’t start with a fresh 15.6 install but used my current system instead. I think I’ll wait a few more months until all the packages are properly fixed and Packman is smoothly integrated. Then it should be fine. Still… Agama is missing RAID support; they should implement that quickly, otherwise it’s going to be a joke.
