Growlight

"Growlight logo"

Grow, baby, grow

Growlight is Sprezzatech's open source installer project, designed for use with SprezzOS.

Identifying Block Devices

Terminology!

• UUID A 128-bit RFC 4122 number. Used in GPT for disks and partitions. Used in many filesystems.
• WWN A 64- or 128-bit number associated with physical components. Makes use of IEEE OUIs.
• Partition table: A structure describing logical volumes on a single disk
  • Disklabel An old (BSDish) name for a partition table
• Label A string of up to 16 bytes associated with a filesystem
  • Volume Label An old (DOSish) name for a filesystem label
• Master Boot Record The first sector on a disk in a BIOS/MBR machine
  • Boot sector The first sector of a bootable partition

Thus:

• A disk has a WWN, a model, and a serial number.
• A GPT partition table has a UUID, sometimes called the disk GUID
  • but though there is only one per disk, it's a property of the GUID Partition Table
• A MBR partition table has nothing, really.
• A GPT partition has a UUID and a name of up to 36 UTF-16LE units
  • A GPT partition also has a 128-bit number for its partition type, but they're commonly defined
    • Thus UUID/GUID is really a misnomer, but whatever
    • 024DEE41-33E7-11D3-9D69-0008C781F39F -- MBR scheme
    • C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B -- EFI system partition (ESP)
    • ebd0a0a2-b9e5-4433-87c0-68b6b72699c7 -- basic data partition
    • A19D880F-05FC-4D3B-A006-743F0F84911E -- linux raid
    • etc...
• A MBR partition once again has nothing, just an 8-bit type.
• A filesystem probably has a label, and probably has a UUID. Depends on the filesystem.

Partition Tables

FIXME I think some of these values are wrong, maybe embarrassingly so

Table type	Max disk size	Max partition size	Max partitions
MBR (CHS)	8GB	8GB	4 primary OR 3 primary, 1 extended, arbitrarily many logical
MBR (LBA)	8TB	2TB	4 primary OR 3 primary, 1 extended, arbitrarily many logical
GPT	9.4ZB	9.4ZB	128

Resources

The Growlight component of the SprezzOS project can be found on Sprezzabugs. Source is available from GitHub.

8 SATAII devices on 8xPCIe 2.0: 3GB/s on 4GB/s ✔
LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS2008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2 [Falcon] (rev 03)
 [0:0:0:0]    disk    ATA      ST2000DL003-9VT1 CC3C 
 [0:0:1:0]    disk    ATA      ST2000DL003-9VT1 CC3C
 [0:0:2:0]    disk    ATA      ST2000DL003-9VT1 CC32
 [0:0:3:0]    disk    ATA      ST2000DL003-9VT1 CC3C
 [0:0:4:0]    disk    ATA      INTEL SSDSA2M080 02HD
 [0:0:5:0]    disk    ATA      WDC WD20EARS-00M 51.0
 [0:0:6:0]    disk    ATA      WDC WD20EARS-00M 51.0
 [0:0:7:0]    disk    ATA      ST2000DL003-9VT1 CC32

2 SATAIII devices on 1xPCIe 2.0: 1.5GB/s on 500MB/s ✘
Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88SE9120 SATA 6Gb/s Controller (rev 12)
[10:0:0:0]    disk    ATA      ST2000DL003-9VT1 CC32
[11:0:0:0]    disk    ATA      ST3000DM001-9YN1 CC9C

1 SATAII device on USB 2.0: 375MB/s on 480MB/s ✔−
Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 (rev 05)
[19:0:0:0]    disk    HTC      Android Phone    0100

1 SATAIII device +
1 SATAII device on 1xPCIe 2.0: 1.125GB/s on 500MB/s ✘
Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88SE9123 PCIe SATA 6.0 Gb/s controller (rev 11)
 [2:0:0:0]    disk    ATA      INTEL SSDSA2CW12 0302
 [3:0:0:0]    disk    ATA      ST2000DL003-9VT1 CC32

4 SATAII devices +
1 SATAIII-on-SATAII device (✘) on PCI 2.0 PCH (?)
Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family SATA AHCI Controller (rev 05)
 [4:0:0:0]    disk    ATA      ST9320423AS      SDM1
 [5:0:0:0]    disk    ATA      ST9320423AS      SDM1
 [6:0:0:0]    cd/dvd  ATAPI    iHBS112   2      CL0F
 [7:0:0:0]    disk    ATA      WDC WD20EARX-00P 51.0
 [9:0:0:0]    disk    ATA      ST3000DM001-9YN1 CC9C


1 MDRAID6
1 MDRAID1
1 ZRAID2

Definite Goals

• Boot with a single image on UEFI/BIOS-based machines
  • http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/4957.html
  • http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Features/UEFI
• As much compatibility with debian installer as is reasonable/justified
  • http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debconf6/slides/Debian_installer_workshop-Frans_Pop/paper/
• Look as good as is reasonable
• Robustness in the face of lossy/problematic devices

Disks

• Fully support ZFS during install, include RAIDZ setup
• Use GPT (correctly) by default.
• Extract true parameters from SSDs and 4k sector (especially WD-EARS) drives
• Properly align everything

Possible Goals

• Install either Linux or FreeBSD