The growpart command cannot grow a partition beyond 2TB in a system hosted in AWS Cloud

This document (000020334) is provided subject to the disclaimer at the end of this document.

Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12

Situation

The system is hosted in the AWS Cloud.
A disk belonging to the system is already resized from 3 TB to 3.5 TB in Amazon EC2.
However, when the "growpart" command is used to grow the partition from the same disk in the system, the following error is seen.
For example:
# growpart /dev/nvme1n1 1
NOCHANGE: partition 1 could only be grown by -2147481600 [fudge=2048]

Resolution

Add the "sle-module-public-cloud" module extension to the system.
For example:
SUSEConnect -p sle-module-public-cloud/12/x86_64

Update the "growpart" package to at least version "0.31-4.14.2".
For example:
zypper update growpart

After the "growpart" package is updated, the partition can be resized beyond 2TB successfully.

Cause

The original "growpart" package version "0.30-4.5.1" has a bug which causes this issue.
# zypper info growpart
...
Information for package growpart:
---------------------------------
Repository : @System
Name : growpart
Version : 0.30-4.5.1
Arch : noarch
Vendor : SUSE LLC <https://www.suse.com/>
...

The latest patch for the "growpart" package is not available in the default repositories.
So the "sle-module-public-cloud" module extension must be added in order to get the latest patch.

Status

Reported to Engineering

Additional Information

Similar issue can also happen to a system hosted in Azure Cloud.

Turn on the verbose flag (-v) for "growpart" command to see additional warning message to help identify this issue:
For example:
# growpart -v /dev/nvme1n1 1
...
WARN: disk is larger than 2TB. additional space will go unused.
...
NOCHANGE: partition 1 could only be grown by -2147481600 [fudge=2048]

Disclaimer

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