on Tuesday 16 August 2011 Frank Steiner wrote:

Although I can load the module, the installer doesn't know how to handle ext4, so it seems there is no chance...

SLES11 has no ext4 support - not even SP2 will have that (was not my idea) If you put the kernel module into initrd you maybe can do all partitioning in a pre-script and set format+create to false in the XML file. That might work. -- ciao, Uwe Gansert Uwe Gansert SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) GF: Jeff Hawn, Jennifer Guild, Felix Imendörffer Home: http://www.suse.de/~ug - Blog: http://suse.gansert.net listening to: "Egoshooter" by Eisenfunk -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-autoinstall+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-autoinstall+help@opensuse.org

Sascha Wehnert wrote

If the outcome should be a supported setup, then ext4 is definitely not the way to go. We will not support it on SLE11.

You are definitely taking the wrong approach. There is no reason why you couldn't add ext4 as "it's availabe, but not supported, use on your own risk" feature as you do it with many others (like lpr or lilo). Your (=Novells) approach is like Apple one's, "No no, we decide what you are allowed to do, we won't even let you try it on your own risk!" The problem is that you are really way behind from a feature-point-of-view with SLE 11. It was ok when you released a new SLE every two years, but if you do not add new functionality with a SP release, SLE becomes kind of unusable. SLES 12 is planned for 2013. Do you really think that we can stay at the same technological level for 4 years? That might be ok for industrial customers, but you will definitely lose support in the universities environment. Not even talking about SLED where we will need Mesa/Gallium3D support during the next year. I would bet that SP2 won't have it. Knowing that ext4 will not be in SP2 really makes us think about alternatives. Have you ever done a fsck on a 20 TB raid with ext3? And compared that to ext4? The downtime is one day compared to half an hour. We are running all our storage raids with ext4 and had no problem ever for two years. But now we need the functionality to add ext4 during installation and it is a hassle because AY cannot even create a fstab with the word "ext4" in it, so even with scripting it is a big problem. I'm hacking a lot in the kernel etc., but I'm not going to add ext4 to AY, that's too much effort. It sounds like we have to switch to opensuse and use SLE only to replicate a problem on it when we need support. I'm not a stupid IT worker in some company. I'm a qualified system administrator in a research environment. That's a difference. Give me the features that are there and tell me that they are not supported. But let *me* decide if I use them on my own risk or not. Otherwise SLE really turns from Linux into some kind of Mac OS. cu, Frank -- Dipl.-Inform. Frank Steiner Web: http://www.bio.ifi.lmu.de/~steiner/ Lehrstuhl f. Bioinformatik Mail: http://www.bio.ifi.lmu.de/~steiner/m/ LMU, Amalienstr. 17 Phone: +49 89 2180-4049 80333 Muenchen, Germany Fax: +49 89 2180-99-4049 * Rekursion kann man erst verstehen, wenn man Rekursion verstanden hat. * -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-autoinstall+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-autoinstall+help@opensuse.org

Hi Peter, thanks for caring. Peter Albrecht wrote

Would moving to XFS be an option for you? Just put /boot on a separate partion formatted with ext3 and all the other partitions/LVs with XFS.

we tried XFS with SLE 11 GA but dropped it again for two reasons: First it was really a lot slower in our kind of access patterns (self-written bioinformatic programs in Java, running in a grid). Second, we had problems when a server failed to cleanly unmount the system during a reboot (no idea why that happened, I guess it was a fibre channel problem). When the system came up again it had errors on the file systems and the repair of the 12 TB FS really went bad with certain directories gone or moved to lost+found. We never saw that with ext3 or even ext4. It might be a very special circumstance in our environment that triggered this, but it was a hassle. Another nice feature with ext4 is online shrinking which we know we will need some times when shrinking one raid with 1 TB disks to enlarge the other one with 2 TB disks in the same JBOD. I might try to run the openSuSE 11.2 installer (which I think supports ext4) and make it install the SLE 11 SP1 software. That might work, at least sth. like that worked with SLE 10 and SuSE 10.1). cu, Frank -- Dipl.-Inform. Frank Steiner Web: http://www.bio.ifi.lmu.de/~steiner/ Lehrstuhl f. Bioinformatik Mail: http://www.bio.ifi.lmu.de/~steiner/m/ LMU, Amalienstr. 17 Phone: +49 89 2180-4049 80333 Muenchen, Germany Fax: +49 89 2180-99-4049 * Rekursion kann man erst verstehen, wenn man Rekursion verstanden hat. * -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-autoinstall+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-autoinstall+help@opensuse.org

on Wednesday 17 August 2011 Frank Steiner wrote:

Sascha Wehnert wrote

...

If the outcome should be a supported setup, then ext4 is definitely not the way to go. We will not support it on SLE11.

You are definitely taking the wrong approach. There is no reason why you couldn't add ext4 as "it's availabe, but not supported, use on your own risk" feature as you do it with many others (like lpr or lilo).

I just checked again with the Product Management of SLES11 and we will have the ext4 module in the inst-sys. Still unsupported but it's there :) -- ciao, Uwe Gansert Uwe Gansert SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) GF: Jeff Hawn, Jennifer Guild, Felix Imendörffer Home: http://www.suse.de/~ug - Blog: http://suse.gansert.net listening to: "Pong" by Eisenfunk -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-autoinstall+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-autoinstall+help@opensuse.org