1 GNU parted NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 libparted: no longer aborts (failed assertion) due to a nilfs2_probe bug
8 [bug introduced in parted-2.4 with the addition of nilfs2 support]
10 libparted: no longer aborts when reading a truncated GPT-formatted device
11 [bug present at least as far back as RHEL4's parted-1.6.19]
13 libparted: works with a two-component linux kernel version number like 3.0
14 [bug present since the beginning]
17 * Noteworthy changes in release 3.0 (2011-05-30) [stable]
21 Fix numerous small leaks in both the library and the UI.
23 ** Changes in behavior
25 Remove all FS-related (file system-related) sub-commands; these commands
26 are no longer recognized because they were all dependent on parted "knowing"
27 too much about file system: mkpartfs, mkfs, cp, move, check, resize.
28 This change removes not just the user interface bits, but also the
29 library functions and nearly all of the underlying FS-munging code.
30 The code embedded in Parted by which it knew about those file systems
31 was so old, unmaintainable and buggy that while seemingly drastic,
32 this change is like removing a gangrenous toe.
34 Here is the list of removed functions:
36 ped_file_system_clobber
38 ped_file_system_create
42 ped_file_system_resize
43 ped_file_system_get_create_constraint
44 ped_file_system_get_resize_constraint
45 ped_file_system_get_copy_constraint
47 This change also removes the corresponding function members
48 from "struct _PedFileSystemOps":
50 clobber open create close check copy resize get_create_constraint
51 get_resize_constraint get_copy_constraint
54 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.4 (2011-05-18) [stable]
58 parted no longer allows the modification of certain in-use partitions.
59 In particular, before this fix, parted would permit removal or modification
60 of any in-use partition on a dmraid and any in-use partition beyond the 15th
61 on a regular scsi disk.
63 Improve support of DASD devices on the s390 architecture.
64 Parted now supports all DASD types (CKD and FBA), DASD formats (CDL,
65 LDL, CMS non-reserved, and CMS reserved), and DASD drivers (ECKD, FBA,
66 and DIAG) in all combinations supported by the Linux kernel. As before,
67 only CDL format on CKD DASD using the ECKD driver is supported for
68 read-write operations (create, delete, move, re-size, etc.). However,
69 the implicit partition present on LDL- and CMS-formatted disks is now
70 correctly recognized for read-only operations. In detail:
72 - parted now correctly handles LDL-format disks with a block
73 size other than 4096 (bug fix)
75 - parted now recognizes the CMS disk format, both reserved
76 and non-reserved (enhancement)
78 - parted now supports FBA DASD devices (enhancement)
80 - parted now supports the DIAG driver when running in a
81 virtual machine under z/VM (enhancement)
83 libparted: raise the limit on the maximum start sector and the
84 maximum number of sectors in a "loop" partition table from 2^32 to 2^64.
85 [bug introduced in parted-2.1]
87 libparted once again recognizes a whole-disk FAT partition
88 [bug introduced in parted-1.9.0]
90 libparted now recognizes scsi disks with a high major (128-135) as scsi
93 an msdos partition table on a very small device (smaller than one cylinder)
94 is now recognized. [bug introduced in parted-2.2]
96 libparted: zero-length devices (other than files) are ignored rather than
97 throwing an exception.
99 libparted: gpt label creation can no longer divide by zero with a
100 defective device or when a concurrent writer modifies the PE-size
101 bytes in the small interval between the write and subsequent read
102 of the primary GPT header.
104 ** Changes in behavior
106 "parted $dev print" now prints information about the device (model, size,
107 transport, sector size) even when it fails to recognize the disk label.
109 specifying partition start or end values using MiB, GiB, etc. suffixes
110 now makes parted do what I want, i.e., use that precise value, and not
111 some other that is up to 500KiB or 500MiB away from what I specified.
112 Before, to get that behavior, you would have had to use carefully chosen
113 values with units of bytes ("B") or sectors ("s") to obtain the same
114 result, and with sectors, your usage would not be portable between devices
115 with varying sector sizes. This change does not affect how parted handles
116 suffixes like KB, MB, GB, etc.
119 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.3 (2010-05-28) [stable]
123 parted now recognizes ATA over Ethernet (AoE) devices
125 parted now recognizes Linux Software RAID Arrays
127 libparted has a new partition flag to check for diagnostic (aka recovery
128 or reserved) partitions: PED_PARTITION_DIAG
132 When libparted deferenced a /dev/mapper/foo symlink, it would keep the
133 resulting /dev/dm-N name and sometimes use it later, even though it
134 had since become stale and invalid. It no longer stores the result
135 of dereferencing a /dev/mapper symlink.
137 libparted's msdos_partition_is_flag_available function now always reports
138 that the "hidden" flag is not available for an extended partition.
139 Similarly, msdos_partition_get_flag(p,PED_PARTITION_HIDDEN) always returns 0
140 for an extended partition.
142 libparted uses a more accurate heuristic to distinguish between
143 ext4 and ext3 partitions.
145 libparted now properly checks the return value of dm_task_run when
146 operating on devicemapper devices.
148 allow using ped_device_cache_remove(dev) followed by a (later)
149 ped_device_destroy() without corrupting the device cache.
151 when creating an ext2 file system[*], Parted no longer creates an
152 invalid one when its size is 2TiB or larger.
153 [*] Remember, now all FS-creation operations are deprecated in Parted.
154 This is not an indicator that we'll be supporting this code.
155 On the contrary, it is slated to be removed.
157 ** Changes in behavior
159 libparted no longer issues an exception/warning about >512-byte
160 sector support being "HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL". It seems to have matured
161 enough to be usable at least with GPT and MSDOS partition tables.
164 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.2 (2010-02-26) [stable]
166 ** Changes in behavior
168 The default alignment (--align option) for newly created partitions has
169 been changed to optimal.
173 The ped_device_get_*_alignment() functions now return a sane default
174 value instead of NULL when the so called topology information is incomplete.
175 The default minimum alignment aligns to physical sector size, the default
176 optimal alignment is 1MiB, which is what vista and windows 7 do.
180 Parted no longer uses a physical sector size of 0 or of any other
181 value smaller than the logical sector size.
183 dos: creating an HFS or HFS+ partition in an msdos partition table
184 used to set the partition type to 0x83. That is wrong. The required
185 number is 0xaf, and that is what is used now.
187 gpt: read-only operation could clobber MBR part of hybrid GPT+MBR table
188 [bug introduced in parted-2.1]
190 gpt: a read-only operation like "parted $dev print" would overwrite $dev's
191 protective MBR when exactly one of the primary and backup GPT tables was
193 [bug introduced prior to parted-1.8.0]
195 sun: the version, sanity and nparts VTOC fields were ignored by libparted.
196 Those fields are properly initialized now. The nparts (number of partitions)
197 field is initialized to 8 (max. number of sun partitions) rather that to a
198 real number of partitions. This solution is compatible with Linux kernel
201 "make install" no longer installs tests programs named disk and label
203 libparted: try harder to inform kernel of partition changes.
204 Previously when editing partitions, occasionally the kernel would
205 fail to be informed of partition changes. When this happened future
206 problems would occur because the kernel had incorrect information.
207 For example, if this problem arose when resizing or creating a
208 new partition, then an incorrect partition size might be displayed
209 or a user might encounter a failure to format or delete a newly
210 created partition, respectively.
212 libparted: committing a disk that was returned by ped_disk_duplicate
213 would always result in ped_disk_clobber being called (and thus the first
214 and last 9KiB of the disk being zeroed), even if the duplicated disk,
215 was not returned by ped_disk_fresh().
218 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.1 (2009-12-20) [stable]
222 new --align=<align> commandline option which can have the following values:
223 none: Use the minimum alignment allowed by the disk type
224 cylinder: Align partitions to cylinders (the default)
225 minimal: Use minimum alignment as given by the disk topology information
226 optimal: Use optimum alignment as given by the disk topology information
227 The minimal and optimal values will use layout information provided by the
228 disk to align the logical partition table addresses to actual physical
229 blocks on the disks. The mininal value uses the minimum aligment needed to
230 align the partition properly to physical blocks, which avoids performance
231 degradation. Where as the optimal value uses a multiple of the physical
232 block size in a way that guarantees optimal performance.
233 The min and opt values will only work when compiled with
234 libblkid >= 2.17 and running on a kernel >= 2.6.31, otherwise they will
235 behave as the none --align value.
237 libparted: new functions to set per disk (instead of per partition) flags:
240 ped_disk_is_flag_available()
241 ped_disk_flag_get_name()
242 ped_disk_flag_get_by_name()
245 libparted: new per disk flag: PED_DISK_CYLINDER_ALIGNMENT. This flag
246 (which defaults to true) controls if disk types for which cylinder alignment
247 is optional do cylinder alignment when a new partition gets added.
249 libparted: new functions to return per-partition-table-type limits:
250 - ped_disk_max_partition_start_sector: Return the largest representable
251 start sector number for a given "disk".
252 - ped_disk_max_partition_length: Return the maximum partition length
255 new command "align-check TYPE N" to determine whether the starting sector
256 of partition N is TYPE(minimal|optimal)-aligned for the disk. E.g.,
257 parted -s /dev/sda align-check min 1 && echo partition 1 is min-aligned
258 parted -s /dev/sda align-check opt 2 && echo partition 2 is opt-aligned
259 The same libblkid and kernel version requirements apply as for --align
261 Add functions to libparted to get minimal and optimal alignment
262 information from devices:
263 ped_device_get_minimal_aligned_constraint()
264 ped_device_get_optimal_aligned_constraint()
265 ped_device_get_minimum_alignment()
266 ped_device_get_optimum_alignment()
267 The same libblkid and kernel version requirements apply as for --align
269 Add ped_disk_get_partition_alignment() function to libparted to get
270 information about alignment enforced by the disk type.
274 parted can once again create partition tables on loop devices.
275 Before, "parted -s /dev/loop0 mklabel gpt" would fail.
276 [bug introduced in parted-1.9.0]
278 improved >512-byte sector support: for example, printing a table on a
279 4k-sector disk would show "Sector size (logical/physical): 4096B/512B",
280 when the sizes should have been "4096B/4096B".
282 gpt tables are more rigorously checked; before, partition entry array CRCs
283 were not checked, and we would mistakenly use the AlternateLBA member of a
284 known-corrupt primary table.
286 improved dasd disk support, in previous versions calling
287 ped_disk_new_fresh() or ped_disk_duplicate() on a dasd type PedDisk
288 would fail. This is fixed now.
290 handle device nodes created by lvm build with udev synchronisation enabled
293 when printing tables, parted no longer truncates flag names
296 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
300 Parted now supports disks with sector size larger than 512 bytes.
301 Before this release, Parted could operate only on disks with a sector
302 size of 512 bytes. However, disk manufacturers are already making disks
303 with an exposed hardware sector size of 4096 bytes. Prior versions of
304 Parted cannot even read a partition table on such a device, not to
305 mention create or manipulate existing partition tables.
306 Due to internal design and time constraints, the following
307 less-common partition table types are currently disabled:
308 amiga, bsd, aix, pc98
309 "bsd" and "amiga" are mostly done, but had a few minor problems,
310 so may remain disabled until someone requests that they be revived.
314 big-endian systems can once again read GPT partition tables
315 [bug introduced in parted-1.9.0]
317 ped_partition_is_busy no longer calls libparted's exception handler,
318 since doing so caused trouble with anaconda/pyparted when operating on
321 Partitions in a GPT table are no longer assigned the "microsoft
322 reserved partition" type. Before this change, each partition would
323 be listed with a type of "msftres" by default.
326 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.9.0 (2009-07-23) [stable]
330 parted now preserves the protective MBR (PMBR) in GPT type labels.
331 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2008-December/\
333 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-parted/2008-12/msg00015.html
335 gpt_read now uses SizeOfPartitionEntry instead of the size of
336 GuidPartitionEntry_t. This ensures that *all* of the partition
337 entries are correctly read.
338 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2008-December/\
340 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/attachments/\
341 20081202/b7c0528d/attachment.txt
343 mklabel (interactive mode) now correctly asks for confirmation, when
344 replacing an existent label, without outputting an error message.
345 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2009-January/\
348 resize now handles FAT16 file systems with a 64k cluster. This
349 configuration is not common, but it is possible.
350 http://parted.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/ticket/207
352 parted now ignores devices of the type /dev/md* when probing. These
353 types of devices should be handled by the device-mapper capabilities
355 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2009-April/\
358 The parted documentation now describes the differences in the options
359 passed to mkpart for the label types.
360 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2009-April/\
363 ** Changes in behavior
365 include/parted/beos.h, include/parted/gnu.h and include/parted/linux.h
366 have been removed. The symbols contained in these files (GNUSpecific,
367 ped_device_new_from_store, BEOSSpecific, LinuxSpecific, LINUX_SPECIFIC)
368 were moved to the individual files that need them.
370 In libparted, the linux-swap "filesystem" types are now called
371 "linux-swap(v0)" and "linux-swap(v1)" rather than "linux-swap(old)"
372 and "linux-swap(new)" as in parted 1.8, or "linux-swap" as in older
373 versions; "old" and "new" generally make poor names, and v1 is the
374 only format supported by current Linux kernels. Aliases for all
375 previous names are available.
377 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.8.1 (2007-12-17) [stable]
379 ** FIXME: fill in details
381 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.8 (2007-08-09) [stable]
383 ** GNU parted is now licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3
384 or higher. See the COPYING file for more details.
387 - Add compute_block_counts() to improve ext2fs support.
388 - Properly detect 'ext2 fs too small' cases.
389 - Move formatting commands out of translatable strings.
390 - Read an msdos partition table from a device with 2K sectors.
391 - Remove always-false "Unable to open" diagnostic in ped_disk_new(),
392 leave the "unrecognized disk label" diagnostic.
393 - Don't leak partition table buffer in amiga_read().
394 - Don't read/write initialized memory with DEBUG turned on off for
395 'mklabel bsd' and 'mklabel amiga' command calls.
396 - Turn off DEBUG in libparted.c to avoid initializing all allocated
398 - Correct handling of HeaderSize field in GPT labels.
399 - Fix block number used when checking for ext2 fs state.
400 - Add detection support for Xen virtual block devices (/dev/xvd*).
401 - When reading DASD labels, check the filesystem type as well as
402 partition flags to determine what's on the partition.
403 - Add _dm_probe_all() from Debian to probe for all device-mapper
407 - Fixed exception handling in mkpart and mkpartfs commands.
408 - Add the --dry-run option to the partprobe command.
409 - Update docs: cannot specify 'primary' for a partition on a loop
411 - Remove unused functions (get_spaces).
412 - Fix off-by-one error in str_list_print_wrap().
413 - Use xmalloc() and xrealloc() to check return values.
414 - Fix invalid command line argument handling.
415 - Close memory leaks in parted.c and table.c.
416 - Fix warnings when compiling with translation support enabled.
417 - Use a consistent prompt when asking for a file system type.
418 - Update docs: don't reference old versions of gzip.
421 - Improve the testing framework in the tests/ subdirectory. Build out
422 more of the testing scripts so we can start using that to ensure we
423 don't introduce regressions in releases.
424 - Support testing with tmpfs filesystems on Linux.
425 - Work around inadequate libreadline in the configure script.
426 - Don't include config.h from internal headers.
428 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.7 (2007-05-09) [stable]
431 - Prevent compilation of DASD code on GNU Hurd systems.
432 - Integrate new unit testing framework for parted and libparted.
433 - Fix primary partition cylinder alignment error for DOS disk labels.
434 - Use PED_PARTITION_NORMAL in place of PED_PARTITION_PRIMARY.
435 - Avoid segfault due to a double free on reiserfs support.
438 - Fix script mode (-s) for mkfs command in parted.
439 - Suppress "you are not superuser..." warning in script mode.
440 - Fix off-by-one bug in parted when displaying information about the
442 - Do not translate partition names in the 'parted print' command.
443 This causes problems for non-Latin-based character sets.
444 - Send errors to stderr rather than stdout.
445 - Handle command line options independent of the order.
446 - Abort on any invalid option and handle -v and -h first.
447 - Only display the update /etc/fstab message when there has been a
448 change to the disk (a shorter and more direct message too).
450 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.6 (2007-03-20) [stable]
452 ** Revert the implementation of the linux-swap(new) and linux-swap(old) types.
453 The type is 'linux-swap' for v1, v2, and s1suspend swap partitions on Linux.
455 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.5 (2007-03-20) [stable]
457 ** Another minor update. Both versions 1.8.3 and 1.8.4 lacked po translation
458 files. These are included with version 1.8.5.
460 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.4 (2007-03-19) [stable]
462 ** Minor bug fix release for 1.8.3 to fix build issues on various
464 - Use 'uname -m' to determine if we build on System Z or not.
465 - Include <parted/vtoc.h> in <parted/fdasd.h> for format1_label_t
467 - Remove unused variables in libparted/arch/linux.c (-Werror).
468 - Check return values on fgets() and asprint() in libparted/arch/linux.c
470 - Check for tgetent() in libtinfo in the configure script.
471 - Move some macro definitions in <parted/disk.h> to fix a compile
472 problem with gcc-4.1.2 as indicated here:
473 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-parted/2007-03/msg00008.html
475 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.3 (2007-03-16) [stable]
478 - Header file clean ups.
479 - Sync the linux-swap header according to the Linux kernel sources.
480 - Enable support for swsusp partitions and the ability to differentiate
481 between old and new versions of linux-swap partitions.
482 - Renaming PARTITION_EXT to PARTITION_DOS_EXT in the DOS disklabel
483 code (consitency with Linux kernel source).
484 - Added libparted.pc pkg-config file.
485 - Remove unused functions, ifdefs, and other code.
486 - Deprecate ped_[register|unregister]_disk_type in favor of
487 ped_disk_type_[register|unregister].
488 - Small test program fixes (in label.c and common.c).
489 - Make functions const-correct.
490 - Handle systems where libreadline is not available.
491 - Preserve starting sector for primary NTFS 3.1 partitions on DOS
493 - Handle 2048-byte logical sectors in linux_read().
494 - Use PED_SECTOR_SIZE_DEFAULT macro in place of 512.
495 - Don't assume logical sector size is <= 512B on AIX.
496 - Detect HFS write failure.
497 - Use mkstemp() in place of mktemp().
498 - Added HFS+ resize support.
499 - Don't build DASD support on non-zSeries hardware.
502 - Use fputs() and putchar() in place for printf(), when possible.
503 - Detect/report stdout write errors.
504 - Accept the --version and --help options.
505 - Fix memory leaks in parted(8).
508 - Synchronize the manual page and --help documentation.
509 - GNU autoconf and automake updates.
510 - 'gcc -Wall -Wshadow' warning cleanups.
511 - Don't define _GNU_SOURCE manually.
512 - Documentation updates and cleanups (AUTHORS, copyright notices,
514 - Use gnulib (http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/).
516 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.2 (2007-01-12) [stable]
519 - Add the ped_device_cache_remove() function to remove a device from
520 the cache. This is necessary for some things that use libparted,
522 - Fix a segfault in ped_assert() where the wrong pointer is freed in
523 the backtrace handler.
524 - Only call _disk_warn_loss(disk) in do_mklabel() if disk is not NULL.
525 Fixes a segfault when initializing new volumes.
526 - Dynamically allocate space for exception messages.
527 - Output a backtrace when catching SEGV_MAPPER or a general SIGSEGV.
530 - Destroy all objects before return when called with --list or --all
532 - Zero sized device is shown as 0.00B and not -0.00kB.
533 - Implement 'print devices' command.
534 - Alias 'print list' to 'print all'.
535 - Alias 'mktable' to 'mklabel'.
538 - Other bug fixes, documentation updates, and translation improvements.
539 - Code and API clean-ups.
541 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.1 (2006-12-04) [stable]
544 - Rework backtrace support.
546 - Added --enable-selinux configure option to enable linking libparted with
547 libselinux and libsepol.
548 - Disable ext2fs resize for now, tell user to use resize2fs.
551 - Fix loop in print_all().
552 - Introduce the -list command-line switch.
553 - Make mktable aliased to mklabel.
554 - Warn before mklabel and mkfs.
555 - Code cleanups in _partition_warn_busy(), _disk_warn_busy(),
556 _partition_warn_loss(), and _disk_warn_loss().
557 - Avoid warning about user permissions when using --version.
558 - Fix 'print' command help.
559 - Proper print when there are no extended partitions, but partition names.
562 - Generate SHA-1 digest of the archive files and upload those along with the
563 actual archive files.
564 - Update translation files.
565 - Remove automatically generated files from version control.
567 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.0 (2006-11-17) [stable]
571 - Correctly handle disks with non-512 byte sector sizes
572 - Support LUN resizing (see new space, allow parted to use it)
573 - Prevent overlap of LastUsableLBA and PartitionEntryLBA in backup GPT
574 - Prevent SIGFPE when FAT sector size is 0
575 - Add ped_exception_get_handler()
576 - DASD support for IBM zSeries systems
577 - AIX disk label support
578 - Detect Promise SX8 storage devices
579 - Macintosh (ppc and x86) disk label improvements:
580 - Prevent LVM and RAID partition types from corrupting the table
581 - Fix removal of driver partition
582 - Add support binary units (MiB, KiB, GiB)
583 - In ped_register_disk_type(), handle disk_types==NULL case
584 - In ped_unregister_disk_type(), handle case where type is not registered
585 - Fix geometry read problems on 64-bit Macs (and probably other 64-bit systems)
586 - Add support for /dev/mapper devices via libdevmapper library
587 - Detect Apple_Boot partition types correctly on MacOS X 10.4 systems
590 - Various bug fixes, signal handling fixes, and spelling error fixes
591 - UI improvements to display more information about the disk and transport
594 ========================================================================
596 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
598 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
599 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
600 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
601 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
602 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
603 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.