adv-partitioning-partitions.rst

Physical Partitions

Each disk declared may be partitioned, i.e. the act of dividing the physical disk into logical sections with the goal to treat one physical disk drive as if it were multiple disks. These are called physical partitions.

Note

A disk may have a maximum of 4 physical partitions.

Each physical partition has a unique number (1,2,3 and 4) and declare a filesystem type and size. All filesystem types with the exception of lvm2, extended and linux-swap require a mount point. LVM physical partitions are used in logical volumes (which will be covered later).

Example

The following example shows 3 physical partitions of a disk: /boot, swap, and /space.

---
partitioning:
  disks:
  - name: sda
    type: msdos
    size: 20480
    partitions:
    - number: 1
      fstype: ext3
      size: 2048
      mountPoint: "/boot"
    - number: 2
      fstype: linux-swap
      size: 1024
    - number: 3
      fstype: ext3
      size: 17408
      label: space
      mountPoint: "/space"

If you are using JSON:

{
    "partitioning": {
        "disks": [
          {
            "name": "sda",
            "type": "msdos",
            "size": 20480,
            "partitions": [
              {
                "number": 1,
                "fstype": "ext3",
                "size": 2048,
                "mountPoint": "/boot"
              },
              {
                "number": 2,
                "fstype": "linux-swap",
                "size": 1024
              },
              {
                "number": 3,
                "fstype": "ext3",
                "size": 17408,
                "label": "space",
                "mountPoint": "/space"
              }
            ]
          }
        ]
    }
}

Note

In a partitioning table, at least one partition must be the /boot partition. In the above example this is one of the physical partitions. Furthermore, the sum of the physical partition sizes must be smaller or equal to the disk size.