3. The default disk partitions

The Sipwise C5 supports the modern concept of installing several releases side by side. The ability to switch between the releases simplifies software upgrades and enables rollbacks. You can find all the benefits here here.

The new partitioning logic is simple. The code of services (e.g., kamailio, MariaDB) is separated from the data (e.g., databases, CDR files) generated and processed by the code, and is located in a different partition of the disk. Additionally, there are two partitions for code with different services versions. This way, the version of the code can be switched very quickly, just by rebooting the system. The data partition will be the same for both versions of the code, and it will always be mounted and ready to be used before the services start.

New partition layout:

  NAME                MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINT
  sda                   8:0    0    xG  0 disk             # Your disk with size X Gb
  |-sda1                8:1    0    1M  0 part             # BIOS legacy boot
  |-sda2                8:2    0  486M  0 part  /boot/efi  # UEFI boot
  `-sda3                8:3    0    yG  0 part             # LVM partition
    `-md0               9:0    0    yG  0 raid1            # SW RAID (if requested)
      |-ngcp-root     253:0    0   10G  0 lvm   /          # 'code' partition
      |-ngcp-fallback 253:1    0   10G  0 lvm              # 'fallback' partition
      `-ngcp-data     253:3    0    zG  0 lvm   /ngcp-data # 'data' partition
                                                           # unassigned space

1st partition: 1M BIOS boot, for BIOS/GPT (legacy) boot
- this allows fallback to grub-pc package (This partition must have its GUID set to 21686148-6449-6E6F-744E-656564454649 To switch to grub-pc, boot from a rescue/live CD, set to bios_grub with parted, then install grub to disk, so it properly embeds core.img)
2nd partition: ~500MB EFI System, for UEFI/GPT boot
- used as /boot/efi, if EFI support is available
3rd partition: LVM that is divided into:
- /dev/mapper/ngcp-root with 10GB (rootfs target) /dev/mapper/ngcp-fallback with 10GB (for rollback/install/upgrade)
- 10% or >=500MB (whichever is bigger) of the remaining space is unassigned to allow LVM snapshots during maintenance
- /dev/mapper/ngcp-data is the /ngcp-data partition with the rest of the disk space for the whole platform data (e.g., databases, CDR files, logs, etc.)

info
info	The installer can only boot from GPT and does not support msdos partitions anymore. The legacy BIOS systems can also boot from GPT, while (U)EFI systems can only boot from GPT (and not from BIOS/legacy boot).