partitions not properly wiped

[ydirson]

In reports like xcp-ng/xcp#390 and https://xcp-ng.org/forum/topic/7465/upgrade-to-8-3-beta-1-fails we see users getting hit by a previous ZFS partition not being properly wiped.

util.zeroOut uses dd to clear explicit block ranges in a given block dev (which cannot account for all kinds of signatures in the wild), and tools like vgcreate are used in a mode that would ask the user what to do. Would there be any problem in calling wipefs -a on the target block device?

I can see it could be a bad idea to use --force on vgcreate, as it is quite an "override all checks" flag and there don't seem to be a flag to just ignore previous contents, although it could avoid any upcoming issues that would not be covered by the current wipefs version.

[MarkSymsCtx]

I think a call to wipefs -a sounds entirely reasonable to resolve this issue.

[ydirson]

It would seem useful for all SR types, so the "sr_create" handling in SRCommand.run would be the place, right?

... except for all those to which it would not apply

[MarkSymsCtx]

It would seem useful for all SR types, so the "sr_create" handling in SRCommand.run would be the place, right?

... except for all those to which it would not apply

Indeed, I suspect you'd get errors on File based SRs. It could probably go in the LVHDSR class though.

[ydirson]

I'm going with createVG, so EXTSR can benefit from it too