As described in the comments, sfdisk was rewritten for util-linux 2.26
(as shipped in F22) and now interprets arguments a sectors, rather
than cylinders.
The current partitioning line is "1 - - *" (start/size/type/bootable)
which means you start getting:
---
/usr/sbin/grub2-install: warning: this msdos-style partition label has
no post-MBR gap; embedding won't be possible.
/usr/sbin/grub2-install: warning: Embedding is not possible. GRUB can
only be installed in this setup by using blocklists. However,
blocklists are UNRELIABLE and their use is discoura ged..
/usr/sbin/grub2-install: error: will not proceed with blocklists.
---
when building images, because the start is interpreted by the new
sfdisk as sector 1 and it crams the partition right next to the MBR.
Specifying "-" for the size is undefined in the man page; even reading
the source it's not totally clear what "-" for the size does [2]. In
any case, the alignment is wrong in sectors or cylinders; we want to
be a multiple of 4KiB for best performance.
The intent here is to create one single, Linux, bootable, partition
taking up the whole disk starting at 1MiB, so "2048 + L *" makes this
clear.
We use the -uS argument to ensure both versions treat this start-value
as a sector offset (newer sfdisk essentially ignores the argument).
As described in the comments, bugs in the older sfdisk necessitate
usage of "--force".
Although we could choose more or less, it seems most common to align
to a 1MiB boundary (i.e. starting at sector 2048). libguestfs has
some disucssion around --alignment and where it sets it's default to
this [3]. The 2.26-era sfdisk also defaults to putting partitions
here. 1MiB should be enough for GPT schemes in the future as well.
[1] https://github.com/karelzak/util-linux/blob/master/libfdisk/src/script.c#L1050
[2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1249893
[3] http://libguestfs.org/virt-resize.1.html
Change-Id: I2c2966f98d1d5ad4ebb433ea148b3b26c65dc1b5
2c32c7ae1a