[Bug 1383948] Re: Ubiquity Installer doesn't recognize existing btrfs partitions

[Damiön la Bagh]

The 1st 15 mintues of this presentation by the SUN engineers who wrote ZFS explains the design philosophy behind partitionless systems (BTRFS/ZFS).
If you can find 15 minutes I highly recommend watching.

"ZFS The Last Word in File Systems"
http://youtu.be/NRoUC9P1PmA


(other filesystems)
The whole point when choosing BTRFS on a setup is to not use any other file systems.
BTRFS/ZFS were designed to replace all other partitions+filesystems+LVM+RAID schemes (see the video)

(coding in small spaces)
The first 64Kib only needs to point to /@/boot how much code do you really need for a pointer?
note: @ refers to the root subvolume that Ubuntu creates automatically on an btrfs install.

(UEFI FAT)
They didn't need to change MBR they just needed to change it to a pointer to a place in an existing filesystem (like the way btrfs works) 

I checked both my desktop and laptop BTRFS boot drives and they both show 0x000: EB 63 90  in the very first sector. 
So I am guessing the EB 63 90 represents BTRFS's boot pointer area.

(wipe btrfs boot sector)
I'll try your experiment in a VM tomorrow (am on nightshift now and want to have my mind clear and focused when I'm wiping sectors)
This did spark me to do some more research. Apparently there is a utility to remove ZFS/BTRFS from a physical disk that is prefered over dd and doesn't have to destroy all of your data. wipefs. https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Problem_FAQ#How_to_clean_up_old_superblock_.3F

(parted developer)
Thank you from the bottom of my heart! Your software has helped me and my colleagues in numerous ways over the years.
Thank you for making something so robust and easy to use.  I've made donations to the gParted project in the past, I'd like to make another donation, is there a page for parted separately or are gParted and parted developed together?

(parted feature req)
where is the best place to add feature requests for parted? I've been secretly hoping that parted would one day shdisplay LVM volume groups and logical volumes, and would display BTRFS/ZFS subvolumes in a similar fashion to how MSDOS extended partitions are currently shown.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1383948

Title:
  Ubiquity Installer doesn't recognize existing btrfs partitions

Status in “parted” package in Ubuntu:
  In Progress

Bug description:
  Steps to reproduce the bug:
  On a machine with an existing raw btrfs partition (no partition table, just raw btrfs to disk as btrfs is intended to be used)
  (created with sudo mkfs.btrfs /dev/sdc)
  From the 14.04.1 LTS live USB
  open a terminal
  scan for btrfs partitions using:
    sudo btrfs device scan
  then view the partition and data usage with
    sudo btrfs filesystem show
  The device is shown
  Label: none  uuid: xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  	Total devices 1 FS bytes used 37.71GiB
  	devid    2 size 223.57GiB used 40.03GiB path /dev/sdc
  Start the Ubuntu Ubiquity Installer by clicking on the icon in the launcher
  Choose Download Updates and install Fluendo then
  Next
  Then choose Do Something Else, Choose partitions manually
  Scroll down to /dev/sdc
  The Ubiquity Partition manager doesn't recognize the btrfs disk/volume and just says free-space (see screenshot with proof)

  What should happen:
  At the partition screen it should recgonize my existing btrfs volume and let me reinstall without formating the btrfs volume

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