GNU parted NEWS -*- outline -*- * Noteworthy changes in release 3.0 (2011-05-30) [stable] ** Bug fixes Fix numerous small leaks in both the library and the UI. ** Changes in behavior Remove all FS-related (file system-related) sub-commands; these commands are no longer recognized because they were all dependent on parted "knowing" too much about file system: mkpartfs, mkfs, cp, move, check, resize. This change removes not just the user interface bits, but also the library functions and nearly all of the underlying FS-munging code. The code embedded in Parted by which it knew about those file systems was so old, unmaintainable and buggy that while seemingly drastic, this change is like removing a gangrenous toe. Here is the list of removed functions: ped_file_system_clobber ped_file_system_open ped_file_system_create ped_file_system_close ped_file_system_check ped_file_system_copy ped_file_system_resize ped_file_system_get_create_constraint ped_file_system_get_resize_constraint ped_file_system_get_copy_constraint This change also removes the corresponding function members from "struct _PedFileSystemOps": clobber open create close check copy resize get_create_constraint get_resize_constraint get_copy_constraint * Noteworthy changes in release 2.4 (2011-05-18) [stable] ** Bug fixes parted no longer allows the modification of certain in-use partitions. In particular, before this fix, parted would permit removal or modification of any in-use partition on a dmraid and any in-use partition beyond the 15th on a regular scsi disk. Improve support of DASD devices on the s390 architecture. Parted now supports all DASD types (CKD and FBA), DASD formats (CDL, LDL, CMS non-reserved, and CMS reserved), and DASD drivers (ECKD, FBA, and DIAG) in all combinations supported by the Linux kernel. As before, only CDL format on CKD DASD using the ECKD driver is supported for read-write operations (create, delete, move, re-size, etc.). However, the implicit partition present on LDL- and CMS-formatted disks is now correctly recognized for read-only operations. In detail: - parted now correctly handles LDL-format disks with a block size other than 4096 (bug fix) - parted now recognizes the CMS disk format, both reserved and non-reserved (enhancement) - parted now supports FBA DASD devices (enhancement) - parted now supports the DIAG driver when running in a virtual machine under z/VM (enhancement) libparted: raise the limit on the maximum start sector and the maximum number of sectors in a "loop" partition table from 2^32 to 2^64. [bug introduced in parted-2.1] libparted once again recognizes a whole-disk FAT partition [bug introduced in parted-1.9.0] libparted now recognizes scsi disks with a high major (128-135) as scsi disks an msdos partition table on a very small device (smaller than one cylinder) is now recognized. [bug introduced in parted-2.2] libparted: zero-length devices (other than files) are ignored rather than throwing an exception. libparted: gpt label creation can no longer divide by zero with a defective device or when a concurrent writer modifies the PE-size bytes in the small interval between the write and subsequent read of the primary GPT header. ** Changes in behavior "parted $dev print" now prints information about the device (model, size, transport, sector size) even when it fails to recognize the disk label. specifying partition start or end values using MiB, GiB, etc. suffixes now makes parted do what I want, i.e., use that precise value, and not some other that is up to 500KiB or 500MiB away from what I specified. Before, to get that behavior, you would have had to use carefully chosen values with units of bytes ("B") or sectors ("s") to obtain the same result, and with sectors, your usage would not be portable between devices with varying sector sizes. This change does not affect how parted handles suffixes like KB, MB, GB, etc. * Noteworthy changes in release 2.3 (2010-05-28) [stable] ** New features parted now recognizes ATA over Ethernet (AoE) devices parted now recognizes Linux Software RAID Arrays libparted has a new partition flag to check for diagnostic (aka recovery or reserved) partitions: PED_PARTITION_DIAG ** Bug fixes When libparted deferenced a /dev/mapper/foo symlink, it would keep the resulting /dev/dm-N name and sometimes use it later, even though it had since become stale and invalid. It no longer stores the result of dereferencing a /dev/mapper symlink. libparted's msdos_partition_is_flag_available function now always reports that the "hidden" flag is not available for an extended partition. Similarly, msdos_partition_get_flag(p,PED_PARTITION_HIDDEN) always returns 0 for an extended partition. libparted uses a more accurate heuristic to distinguish between ext4 and ext3 partitions. libparted now properly checks the return value of dm_task_run when operating on devicemapper devices. allow using ped_device_cache_remove(dev) followed by a (later) ped_device_destroy() without corrupting the device cache. when creating an ext2 file system[*], Parted no longer creates an invalid one when its size is 2TiB or larger. [*] Remember, now all FS-creation operations are deprecated in Parted. This is not an indicator that we'll be supporting this code. On the contrary, it is slated to be removed. ** Changes in behavior libparted no longer issues an exception/warning about >512-byte sector support being "HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL". It seems to have matured enough to be usable at least with GPT and MSDOS partition tables. * Noteworthy changes in release 2.2 (2010-02-26) [stable] ** Changes in behavior The default alignment (--align option) for newly created partitions has been changed to optimal. ** New features The ped_device_get_*_alignment() functions now return a sane default value instead of NULL when the so called topology information is incomplete. The default minimum alignment aligns to physical sector size, the default optimal alignment is 1MiB, which is what vista and windows 7 do. ** Bug fixes Parted no longer uses a physical sector size of 0 or of any other value smaller than the logical sector size. dos: creating an HFS or HFS+ partition in an msdos partition table used to set the partition type to 0x83. That is wrong. The required number is 0xaf, and that is what is used now. gpt: read-only operation could clobber MBR part of hybrid GPT+MBR table [bug introduced in parted-2.1] gpt: a read-only operation like "parted $dev print" would overwrite $dev's protective MBR when exactly one of the primary and backup GPT tables was found to be corrupt. [bug introduced prior to parted-1.8.0] sun: the version, sanity and nparts VTOC fields were ignored by libparted. Those fields are properly initialized now. The nparts (number of partitions) field is initialized to 8 (max. number of sun partitions) rather that to a real number of partitions. This solution is compatible with Linux kernel and Linux fdisk. "make install" no longer installs tests programs named disk and label libparted: try harder to inform kernel of partition changes. Previously when editing partitions, occasionally the kernel would fail to be informed of partition changes. When this happened future problems would occur because the kernel had incorrect information. For example, if this problem arose when resizing or creating a new partition, then an incorrect partition size might be displayed or a user might encounter a failure to format or delete a newly created partition, respectively. libparted: committing a disk that was returned by ped_disk_duplicate would always result in ped_disk_clobber being called (and thus the first and last 9KiB of the disk being zeroed), even if the duplicated disk, was not returned by ped_disk_fresh(). * Noteworthy changes in release 2.1 (2009-12-20) [stable] ** New features new --align= commandline option which can have the following values: none: Use the minimum alignment allowed by the disk type cylinder: Align partitions to cylinders (the default) minimal: Use minimum alignment as given by the disk topology information optimal: Use optimum alignment as given by the disk topology information The minimal and optimal values will use layout information provided by the disk to align the logical partition table addresses to actual physical blocks on the disks. The mininal value uses the minimum aligment needed to align the partition properly to physical blocks, which avoids performance degradation. Where as the optimal value uses a multiple of the physical block size in a way that guarantees optimal performance. The min and opt values will only work when compiled with libblkid >= 2.17 and running on a kernel >= 2.6.31, otherwise they will behave as the none --align value. libparted: new functions to set per disk (instead of per partition) flags: ped_disk_set_flag() ped_disk_get_flag() ped_disk_is_flag_available() ped_disk_flag_get_name() ped_disk_flag_get_by_name() ped_disk_flag_next() libparted: new per disk flag: PED_DISK_CYLINDER_ALIGNMENT. This flag (which defaults to true) controls if disk types for which cylinder alignment is optional do cylinder alignment when a new partition gets added. libparted: new functions to return per-partition-table-type limits: - ped_disk_max_partition_start_sector: Return the largest representable start sector number for a given "disk". - ped_disk_max_partition_length: Return the maximum partition length for a given "disk". new command "align-check TYPE N" to determine whether the starting sector of partition N is TYPE(minimal|optimal)-aligned for the disk. E.g., parted -s /dev/sda align-check min 1 && echo partition 1 is min-aligned parted -s /dev/sda align-check opt 2 && echo partition 2 is opt-aligned The same libblkid and kernel version requirements apply as for --align Add functions to libparted to get minimal and optimal alignment information from devices: ped_device_get_minimal_aligned_constraint() ped_device_get_optimal_aligned_constraint() ped_device_get_minimum_alignment() ped_device_get_optimum_alignment() The same libblkid and kernel version requirements apply as for --align Add ped_disk_get_partition_alignment() function to libparted to get information about alignment enforced by the disk type. ** Bug fixes parted can once again create partition tables on loop devices. Before, "parted -s /dev/loop0 mklabel gpt" would fail. [bug introduced in parted-1.9.0] improved >512-byte sector support: for example, printing a table on a 4k-sector disk would show "Sector size (logical/physical): 4096B/512B", when the sizes should have been "4096B/4096B". gpt tables are more rigorously checked; before, partition entry array CRCs were not checked, and we would mistakenly use the AlternateLBA member of a known-corrupt primary table. improved dasd disk support, in previous versions calling ped_disk_new_fresh() or ped_disk_duplicate() on a dasd type PedDisk would fail. This is fixed now. handle device nodes created by lvm build with udev synchronisation enabled properly. when printing tables, parted no longer truncates flag names * Noteworthy changes in release 2.0 (2009-10-06) [beta] ** Improvements Parted now supports disks with sector size larger than 512 bytes. Before this release, Parted could operate only on disks with a sector size of 512 bytes. However, disk manufacturers are already making disks with an exposed hardware sector size of 4096 bytes. Prior versions of Parted cannot even read a partition table on such a device, not to mention create or manipulate existing partition tables. Due to internal design and time constraints, the following less-common partition table types are currently disabled: amiga, bsd, aix, pc98 "bsd" and "amiga" are mostly done, but had a few minor problems, so may remain disabled until someone requests that they be revived. ** Bug fixes big-endian systems can once again read GPT partition tables [bug introduced in parted-1.9.0] ped_partition_is_busy no longer calls libparted's exception handler, since doing so caused trouble with anaconda/pyparted when operating on dmraid devices. Partitions in a GPT table are no longer assigned the "microsoft reserved partition" type. Before this change, each partition would be listed with a type of "msftres" by default. * Noteworthy changes in release 1.9.0 (2009-07-23) [stable] ** Bug fixes parted now preserves the protective MBR (PMBR) in GPT type labels. http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2008-December/\ 002473.html http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-parted/2008-12/msg00015.html gpt_read now uses SizeOfPartitionEntry instead of the size of GuidPartitionEntry_t. This ensures that *all* of the partition entries are correctly read. http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2008-December/\ 002465.html http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/attachments/\ 20081202/b7c0528d/attachment.txt mklabel (interactive mode) now correctly asks for confirmation, when replacing an existent label, without outputting an error message. http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2009-January/\ 002739.html resize now handles FAT16 file systems with a 64k cluster. This configuration is not common, but it is possible. http://parted.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/ticket/207 parted now ignores devices of the type /dev/md* when probing. These types of devices should be handled by the device-mapper capabilities of parted. http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2009-April/\ 002781.html The parted documentation now describes the differences in the options passed to mkpart for the label types. http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2009-April/\ 002782.html ** Changes in behavior include/parted/beos.h, include/parted/gnu.h and include/parted/linux.h have been removed. The symbols contained in these files (GNUSpecific, ped_device_new_from_store, BEOSSpecific, LinuxSpecific, LINUX_SPECIFIC) were moved to the individual files that need them. In libparted, the linux-swap "filesystem" types are now called "linux-swap(v0)" and "linux-swap(v1)" rather than "linux-swap(old)" and "linux-swap(new)" as in parted 1.8, or "linux-swap" as in older versions; "old" and "new" generally make poor names, and v1 is the only format supported by current Linux kernels. Aliases for all previous names are available. * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.8.1 (2007-12-17) [stable] ** FIXME: fill in details * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.8 (2007-08-09) [stable] ** GNU parted is now licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3 or higher. See the COPYING file for more details. ** libparted: - Add compute_block_counts() to improve ext2fs support. - Properly detect 'ext2 fs too small' cases. - Move formatting commands out of translatable strings. - Read an msdos partition table from a device with 2K sectors. - Remove always-false "Unable to open" diagnostic in ped_disk_new(), leave the "unrecognized disk label" diagnostic. - Don't leak partition table buffer in amiga_read(). - Don't read/write initialized memory with DEBUG turned on off for 'mklabel bsd' and 'mklabel amiga' command calls. - Turn off DEBUG in libparted.c to avoid initializing all allocated memory to '1' bits. - Correct handling of HeaderSize field in GPT labels. - Fix block number used when checking for ext2 fs state. - Add detection support for Xen virtual block devices (/dev/xvd*). - When reading DASD labels, check the filesystem type as well as partition flags to determine what's on the partition. - Add _dm_probe_all() from Debian to probe for all device-mapper devices. ** parted: - Fixed exception handling in mkpart and mkpartfs commands. - Add the --dry-run option to the partprobe command. - Update docs: cannot specify 'primary' for a partition on a loop device. - Remove unused functions (get_spaces). - Fix off-by-one error in str_list_print_wrap(). - Use xmalloc() and xrealloc() to check return values. - Fix invalid command line argument handling. - Close memory leaks in parted.c and table.c. - Fix warnings when compiling with translation support enabled. - Use a consistent prompt when asking for a file system type. - Update docs: don't reference old versions of gzip. ** misc: - Improve the testing framework in the tests/ subdirectory. Build out more of the testing scripts so we can start using that to ensure we don't introduce regressions in releases. - Support testing with tmpfs filesystems on Linux. - Work around inadequate libreadline in the configure script. - Don't include config.h from internal headers. * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.7 (2007-05-09) [stable] ** libparted: - Prevent compilation of DASD code on GNU Hurd systems. - Integrate new unit testing framework for parted and libparted. - Fix primary partition cylinder alignment error for DOS disk labels. - Use PED_PARTITION_NORMAL in place of PED_PARTITION_PRIMARY. - Avoid segfault due to a double free on reiserfs support. ** parted: - Fix script mode (-s) for mkfs command in parted. - Suppress "you are not superuser..." warning in script mode. - Fix off-by-one bug in parted when displaying information about the disk. - Do not translate partition names in the 'parted print' command. This causes problems for non-Latin-based character sets. - Send errors to stderr rather than stdout. - Handle command line options independent of the order. - Abort on any invalid option and handle -v and -h first. - Only display the update /etc/fstab message when there has been a change to the disk (a shorter and more direct message too). * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.6 (2007-03-20) [stable] ** Revert the implementation of the linux-swap(new) and linux-swap(old) types. The type is 'linux-swap' for v1, v2, and s1suspend swap partitions on Linux. * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.5 (2007-03-20) [stable] ** Another minor update. Both versions 1.8.3 and 1.8.4 lacked po translation files. These are included with version 1.8.5. * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.4 (2007-03-19) [stable] ** Minor bug fix release for 1.8.3 to fix build issues on various platforms: - Use 'uname -m' to determine if we build on System Z or not. - Include in for format1_label_t definition. - Remove unused variables in libparted/arch/linux.c (-Werror). - Check return values on fgets() and asprint() in libparted/arch/linux.c (-Werror). - Check for tgetent() in libtinfo in the configure script. - Move some macro definitions in to fix a compile problem with gcc-4.1.2 as indicated here: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-parted/2007-03/msg00008.html * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.3 (2007-03-16) [stable] ** libparted: - Header file clean ups. - Sync the linux-swap header according to the Linux kernel sources. - Enable support for swsusp partitions and the ability to differentiate between old and new versions of linux-swap partitions. - Renaming PARTITION_EXT to PARTITION_DOS_EXT in the DOS disklabel code (consitency with Linux kernel source). - Added libparted.pc pkg-config file. - Remove unused functions, ifdefs, and other code. - Deprecate ped_[register|unregister]_disk_type in favor of ped_disk_type_[register|unregister]. - Small test program fixes (in label.c and common.c). - Make functions const-correct. - Handle systems where libreadline is not available. - Preserve starting sector for primary NTFS 3.1 partitions on DOS disklabel. - Handle 2048-byte logical sectors in linux_read(). - Use PED_SECTOR_SIZE_DEFAULT macro in place of 512. - Don't assume logical sector size is <= 512B on AIX. - Detect HFS write failure. - Use mkstemp() in place of mktemp(). - Added HFS+ resize support. - Don't build DASD support on non-zSeries hardware. ** parted/partprobe: - Use fputs() and putchar() in place for printf(), when possible. - Detect/report stdout write errors. - Accept the --version and --help options. - Fix memory leaks in parted(8). ** general: - Synchronize the manual page and --help documentation. - GNU autoconf and automake updates. - 'gcc -Wall -Wshadow' warning cleanups. - Don't define _GNU_SOURCE manually. - Documentation updates and cleanups (AUTHORS, copyright notices, etc). - Use gnulib (http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/). * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.2 (2007-01-12) [stable] ** libparted: - Add the ped_device_cache_remove() function to remove a device from the cache. This is necessary for some things that use libparted, including pyparted. - Fix a segfault in ped_assert() where the wrong pointer is freed in the backtrace handler. - Only call _disk_warn_loss(disk) in do_mklabel() if disk is not NULL. Fixes a segfault when initializing new volumes. - Dynamically allocate space for exception messages. - Output a backtrace when catching SEGV_MAPPER or a general SIGSEGV. ** parted: - Destroy all objects before return when called with --list or --all option. - Zero sized device is shown as 0.00B and not -0.00kB. - Implement 'print devices' command. - Alias 'print list' to 'print all'. - Alias 'mktable' to 'mklabel'. ** misc: - Other bug fixes, documentation updates, and translation improvements. - Code and API clean-ups. * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.1 (2006-12-04) [stable] ** libparted: - Rework backtrace support. - Code cleanups. - Added --enable-selinux configure option to enable linking libparted with libselinux and libsepol. - Disable ext2fs resize for now, tell user to use resize2fs. ** parted: - Fix loop in print_all(). - Introduce the -list command-line switch. - Make mktable aliased to mklabel. - Warn before mklabel and mkfs. - Code cleanups in _partition_warn_busy(), _disk_warn_busy(), _partition_warn_loss(), and _disk_warn_loss(). - Avoid warning about user permissions when using --version. - Fix 'print' command help. - Proper print when there are no extended partitions, but partition names. ** misc: - Generate SHA-1 digest of the archive files and upload those along with the actual archive files. - Update translation files. - Remove automatically generated files from version control. * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.0 (2006-11-17) [stable] ** libparted: - GPT fixes: - Correctly handle disks with non-512 byte sector sizes - Support LUN resizing (see new space, allow parted to use it) - Prevent overlap of LastUsableLBA and PartitionEntryLBA in backup GPT - Prevent SIGFPE when FAT sector size is 0 - Add ped_exception_get_handler() - DASD support for IBM zSeries systems - AIX disk label support - Detect Promise SX8 storage devices - Macintosh (ppc and x86) disk label improvements: - Prevent LVM and RAID partition types from corrupting the table - Fix removal of driver partition - Add support binary units (MiB, KiB, GiB) - In ped_register_disk_type(), handle disk_types==NULL case - In ped_unregister_disk_type(), handle case where type is not registered - Fix geometry read problems on 64-bit Macs (and probably other 64-bit systems) - Add support for /dev/mapper devices via libdevmapper library - Detect Apple_Boot partition types correctly on MacOS X 10.4 systems ** parted: - Various bug fixes, signal handling fixes, and spelling error fixes - UI improvements to display more information about the disk and transport layer ======================================================================== Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 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