docker-storage-setup tests right now use parted to delete partitions. Also dss right now uses sfdisk to partition a disk and we have run into some issues where it does not work with certain kind of disks. It was suggested to use parted instead. So down the line we want to move to parted instead of sfdisk.
So it might be good idea to ship parted by default with atomic host.
I don't really know the codebase of either that well, but if we can avoid shipping multiple partitioning tools, that'd be nice.
@walters we have couple of bugs where old sfdisk does not work with certain disks. This old sfdisk is coming from old util-linux which is present in centos. And there are no plans to upgrade to latest util-linux in centos.
Solution proposed is to try to make use of parted instead and hopefully that works. Now either we can make code little compicated and make use of parted if it is available or fallback on sfdisk. But this will still not work on rhel/centos atomic hosts shipping old util-linux.
Or we could just always ship parted on all variants of atomic-host (fedora, rhel, centos, ....) and hopefully parted works on all disks with old util-linux as well as new util-linux.
Also sfdisk does not support GPT partition table. And that's required to partition really large disks. We have bugs open on that already. Following is from sfdisk man page.
sfdisk doesn't understand the GUID Partition Table (GPT) format and it is not designed for large partitions. In these cases use the more advanced GNU parted(8).
Well, I was looking at man pages of rhel which has old util-linux and old man pages. So looks like newer sfdisk does support GPT.
Since version 2.26 sfdisk supports MBR (DOS), GPT.....
Again, it boils down to being able to have newer util-linux in rhel/centos. And I don't think that's happening because maintainer does things changes are very big in new version and does not want to now switch to new util-linux.
So if we can just include parted in all variants of atomic host images (fedora, rhel, centos, something else...), that will make sure that problems are taken care of in all variants.
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