On Fri, Sep 26, 2025 at 11:49:42AM +0000, Andy Smith via GLLUG wrote:
Hi,
It breaks things because the block device has signatures indicating
multiple different things and udev picks the first one it finds (zfs in
your case). So it carried on behaving as if you have a zfs device, not
an ext filesystem.
ZFS was actually the second entry. Either way, this is one of my biggest gripes
with open source and Linux, lack of co-ordination and no over-all architect.
Issues like this would not happen if there was a design people adhered to. But
individual groups should also really pay more attention and be stricter in
their designs.
I suppose diagnostics could be better somehow. Or mkfs tools could
detect leftover signatures and warn about them. I've had mkfs.btrfs do
that before.
It could. Block devices, filesystems, mkfs tools, udev and the Debian installer
should all follow an agreed design.
If a device can have multiple signatures (but why?) then udev needs to search
them all. I think udev is the biggest culprit here, and I might submit a bug
report for this.
However, mkfs should warn and when I choose "complete disk with
auto-partitioning" in the Debian installer, it should start by wiping these
signatures. I can still not quite get my head around how this signature ended up on a
device that the Debian installer created though.
Regards,
Henrik Morsing
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