Temporary resource disk mounted as /mnt and no swap on rhel8 sku 8-lvm-gen2 latest

After installing the latest 8-lvm-gen2 RHEL8 on a B4ms I noticed that the /mnt/resource partition is not being mounted and that there is no swap being created. Instead it seems cloud-init has provisioned the disk like this:

# cat /etc/fstab |grep cloud
/dev/disk/cloud/azure_resource-part1    /mnt    auto    defaults,nofail,x-systemd.requires=cloud-init.service,comment=cloudconfig       0       2

Please advise if this behavior is wanted and recommended or if waagent should handle the resource disk and swap. Currently it seems this is explicitly set via waagent.conf in that image. RHEL 8.1 had different defaults.

Distro and WALinuxAgent details (please complete the following information):

• RHEL 8.2 WALinuxAgent-2.2.46-1.el8.5.noarch
• WALinuxAgent version

# waagent --version
WALinuxAgent-2.2.46 running on redhat 8.2
Python: 3.6.8
Goal state agent: 2.2.49.2

the image is with WALinuxAgent-2.2.38-1.el8, I did run yum update afterwards.

[ziesemer]

What was the motivation and/or standard for mounting the resource/temporary/ephemeral disk directly to /mnt? Per my understanding of the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS), /mnt is to be a location for temporarily-mounted filesystems, not a temporary file system itself. This wrecks havoc with other standards and systems that depend on having existing mount point available under /mnt - which isn’t possible when the entire disk may be re-created on a whim.

[picklesrein]

@saimsh-msft thanks for clarifying the suggested best practice.

By default, the ephemeral disk is mounted to /mnt and swap is not created

This didn’t used to be the default. I think one reason this issue exists is that in my ~20 years of Linux administration it has been “not recommended” to clobber the entire /mnt directory with a single filesystem.

Going forward on the next build, would your team consider following established practices and mount the ephemeral disk at /mnt/resource like it used to be?