Hello, we have a lot of hp machines that we use to provision Debian on with FAI. HP raid controllers use the hpacucli utility to manage their raid controller and we use hpacuscripting from the partition hook to load up a preset config for the controller.
My understanding of how FAI does the partitioning is this: after the live system boots up, fai runs set_disk_info to populate the $disklist variable with the available disk devices. Then it runs the task in order until it reaches task_partition. It first calls any partition hook available and then runs setup-storage. If at this point there is no $disklist variable, setup-storage itself calls set_disk_info. Also because the hooks are executed in a sub-shell, we can't run set_disk_info in the hook because the changed value of the variable is discarded after the script exits. The HP controller has a weird behavior (reproducible) that when it boots a system with no raid configuration, it auto-creates a raid volume with the first disks available. So because of that, FAI always boots with $disklist = "sda". And because of the subshell thing we can't change the disklist variable from the hook. We managed to workaround this problem by hardcoding a set_disk_info call on the task_partition subroutine just before setup-storage runs. We think setup-storage should always call set_disk_info when invoked, in order to see any disk changes made by the partition hook.
