Please clarify role of reserve:true for disk devices

[Josef Wolf]

It is not clear from the documentation what semantics the preserve flag has for disk devices.

Is preserve:false required when
- partitions are added deleted?
- Partition size changes?
- partition type changes?
- filesystem on a partition re-created (maybe different filesystem)?

Thanks,

[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

It's needed when you are changing the partition table (so adding a gpt partition table to a blank disk or converting gpt to dos or whatever). TBH this isn't very coherent -- the flag makes more sense when applied to a compound device like a RAID or a volume group, it's not like a curtin invocation is capable of removing a disk from your system!

[Josef Wolf (jw-raven)]

Sorry, but I'm still confused.

If I understand your comment correctly,
- changing size and/or type of partitions (e.g. fat->extX) does not require preserve:true on the disk device?
- adding/removing a partition also doesn't require preserve:true on the disk device??