Trying to understand "Storage Configuration" options in Fedora installer

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1

I’m trying to understand the various options in the “Installation Destination” screen of the Fedora 39 installer. Specifically, the three “Storage Configuration” options:

  • Automatic
  • Custom
  • Advanced Custom (Blivet-GUI)

I haven’t found documentation online that describes the installer in detail. The “Help!” button in the corner opens a screen that purports to do so, but it appears out of date. The help screen describes options like “Automatically configure partitioning” and “I will configure partitioning” that don’t appear in the GUI (I’m guessing this is describing a previous version of the UI). The Help screen also says that select “Automatically configure partitioning” will result in the creation of an LVM layout, which contradicts what I’ve read in various places online, such as this Fedora Magazine article which says that the default since Fedora 33 is btrfs without LVM underneath.

So, two questions:

  • Is there another place I can go for up-to-date documentation?
  • Is there a way to preview what partitions and filesystems will be created when I select “Automatic”?
2

I agree the installer options are poorly documented.

I suggest that you try out each option if you can and try to develop updated docs on how it works. The docs are community maintained so user input is required to update them. That only happens when someone is interested (or frustrated) enough to push the changes through.

If you were to write a bit about how the installer works, specifically the section you commented on, I am sure it would be appreciated by many. Keeping it up-to-date afterward is a task of its own since changes happen frequently.

Not that I know of.
Specifically, with the Workstation version, the generic ‘automatic’ installation using uefi to boot normally creates a vfat efi partition (/boot/efi) of 600M, an ext4 boot partition (/boot) of 1G, and a btrfs partition using the remainder of the free space containing both root (/) and home (/home).

Other versions (spins) may do differently.

3

If you select “Custom”, on the next screen you can click on “Create them automatically” (or something similar), you can see what the automatic would have done. Also, you can get back to the disk configuration part as often as you like, and nothing is done permanently until you select to start the installation. The “blivet” option is also worth looking at, as it presents a graphical view of the disk configuration.