Comment 10 for bug 1523637

------- Comment From <email address hidden> 2016-01-25 11:07 EDT-------
(In reply to comment #24)
> Still, we do add PReP partitions for every ppc64el system. This means you're
> doing manual partitioning, and specifically omitting the PReP partition, no?

Actually, no. The partitioning is the the default chosen. All I did was to specify that all of /dev/sdb should be used.

> In this case, is there any way we can recognize this particular system? Is
> it some chrp subtype that we should completely skip the PReP partition for?
> This would mean changes needed in grub-installer, as well as updates to
> partman-auto automatic partitioning recipes.

I suspect that the installer is already recognizing that it does not need a PReP partition for this system (PowerNV/OPAL):

platform : PowerNV
model : 8247-42L
machine : PowerNV 8247-42L
firmware : OPAL v3

I think the original replication test system tripped across this issue because the system was being used in different test roles, and sharing disk resources between different boot environments. The alternate disk found with a PReP partition was being used by a PowerKVM guest when doing testing for that environment. This is what the PowerKVM guest environment reports:

platform : pSeries
model : IBM pSeries (emulated by qemu)
machine : CHRP IBM pSeries (emulated by qemu)

So, it looks like the installer partitioning code is correctly handling PowerNV vs CHRP. It's the grub bootloader logic that wants to overwrite the first PReP partition it finds (if one doesn't exist on the install drive) that is in question. Was there some historical reason for not wanting a PReP partition on some other drive?