1 GNU parted NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 Improve support of DASD devices on the s390 architecture.
8 Parted now supports all DASD types (CKD and FBA), DASD formats (CDL,
9 LDL, CMS non-reserved, and CMS reserved), and DASD drivers (ECKD, FBA,
10 and DIAG) in all combinations supported by the Linux kernel. As before,
11 only CDL format on CKD DASD using the ECKD driver is supported for
12 read-write operations (create, delete, move, re-size, etc.). However,
13 the implicit partition present on LDL- and CMS-formatted disks is now
14 correctly recognized for read-only operations. In detail:
16 - parted now correctly handles LDL-format disks with a block
17 size other than 4096 (bug fix)
19 - parted now recognizes the CMS disk format, both reserved
20 and non-reserved (enhancement)
22 - parted now supports FBA DASD devices (enhancement)
24 - parted now supports the DIAG driver when running in a
25 virtual machine under z/VM (enhancement)
27 libparted: raise the limit on the maximum start sector and the
28 maximum number of sectors in a "loop" partition table from 2^32 to 2^64.
29 [bug introduced in parted-2.1]
31 libparted once again recognizes a whole-disk FAT partition
32 [bug introduced in parted-1.9.0]
34 libparted now recognizes scsi disks with a high major (128-135) as scsi
37 an msdos partition table on a very small device (smaller than one cylinder)
38 is now recognized. [bug introduced in parted-2.2]
40 libparted: zero-length devices (other than files) are ignored rather than
41 throwing an exception.
43 libparted: gpt label creation can no longer divide by zero with a
44 defective device or when a concurrent writer modifies the PE-size
45 bytes in the small interval between the write and subsequent read
46 of the primary GPT header.
48 ** Changes in behavior
50 "parted $dev print" now prints information about the device (model, size,
51 transport, sector size) even when it fails to recognize the disk label.
53 specifying partition start or end values using MiB, GiB, etc. suffixes
54 now makes parted do what I want, i.e., use that precise value, and not
55 some other that is up to 500KiB or 500MiB away from what I specified.
56 Before, to get that behavior, you would have had to use carefully chosen
57 values with units of bytes ("B") or sectors ("s") to obtain the same
58 result, and with sectors, your usage would not be portable between devices
59 with varying sector sizes. This change does not affect how parted handles
60 suffixes like KB, MB, GB, etc.
63 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.3 (2010-05-28) [stable]
67 parted now recognizes ATA over Ethernet (AoE) devices
69 parted now recognizes Linux Software RAID Arrays
71 libparted has a new partition flag to check for diagnostic (aka recovery
72 or reserved) partitions: PED_PARTITION_DIAG
76 When libparted deferenced a /dev/mapper/foo symlink, it would keep the
77 resulting /dev/dm-N name and sometimes use it later, even though it
78 had since become stale and invalid. It no longer stores the result
79 of dereferencing a /dev/mapper symlink.
81 libparted's msdos_partition_is_flag_available function now always reports
82 that the "hidden" flag is not available for an extended partition.
83 Similarly, msdos_partition_get_flag(p,PED_PARTITION_HIDDEN) always returns 0
84 for an extended partition.
86 libparted uses a more accurate heuristic to distinguish between
87 ext4 and ext3 partitions.
89 libparted now properly checks the return value of dm_task_run when
90 operating on devicemapper devices.
92 allow using ped_device_cache_remove(dev) followed by a (later)
93 ped_device_destroy() without corrupting the device cache.
95 when creating an ext2 file system[*], Parted no longer creates an
96 invalid one when its size is 2TiB or larger.
97 [*] Remember, now all FS-creation operations are deprecated in Parted.
98 This is not an indicator that we'll be supporting this code.
99 On the contrary, it is slated to be removed.
101 ** Changes in behavior
103 libparted no longer issues an exception/warning about >512-byte
104 sector support being "HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL". It seems to have matured
105 enough to be usable at least with GPT and MSDOS partition tables.
108 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.2 (2010-02-26) [stable]
110 ** Changes in behavior
112 The default alignment (--align option) for newly created partitions has
113 been changed to optimal.
117 The ped_device_get_*_alignment() functions now return a sane default
118 value instead of NULL when the so called topology information is incomplete.
119 The default minimum alignment aligns to physical sector size, the default
120 optimal alignment is 1MiB, which is what vista and windows 7 do.
124 Parted no longer uses a physical sector size of 0 or of any other
125 value smaller than the logical sector size.
127 dos: creating an HFS or HFS+ partition in an msdos partition table
128 used to set the partition type to 0x83. That is wrong. The required
129 number is 0xaf, and that is what is used now.
131 gpt: read-only operation could clobber MBR part of hybrid GPT+MBR table
132 [bug introduced in parted-2.1]
134 gpt: a read-only operation like "parted $dev print" would overwrite $dev's
135 protective MBR when exactly one of the primary and backup GPT tables was
137 [bug introduced prior to parted-1.8.0]
139 sun: the version, sanity and nparts VTOC fields were ignored by libparted.
140 Those fields are properly initialized now. The nparts (number of partitions)
141 field is initialized to 8 (max. number of sun partitions) rather that to a
142 real number of partitions. This solution is compatible with Linux kernel
145 "make install" no longer installs tests programs named disk and label
147 libparted: try harder to inform kernel of partition changes.
148 Previously when editing partitions, occasionally the kernel would
149 fail to be informed of partition changes. When this happened future
150 problems would occur because the kernel had incorrect information.
151 For example, if this problem arose when resizing or creating a
152 new partition, then an incorrect partition size might be displayed
153 or a user might encounter a failure to format or delete a newly
154 created partition, respectively.
156 libparted: committing a disk that was returned by ped_disk_duplicate
157 would always result in ped_disk_clobber being called (and thus the first
158 and last 9KiB of the disk being zeroed), even if the duplicated disk,
159 was not returned by ped_disk_fresh().
162 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.1 (2009-12-20) [stable]
166 new --align=<align> commandline option which can have the following values:
167 none: Use the minimum alignment allowed by the disk type
168 cylinder: Align partitions to cylinders (the default)
169 minimal: Use minimum alignment as given by the disk topology information
170 optimal: Use optimum alignment as given by the disk topology information
171 The minimal and optimal values will use layout information provided by the
172 disk to align the logical partition table addresses to actual physical
173 blocks on the disks. The mininal value uses the minimum aligment needed to
174 align the partition properly to physical blocks, which avoids performance
175 degradation. Where as the optimal value uses a multiple of the physical
176 block size in a way that guarantees optimal performance.
177 The min and opt values will only work when compiled with
178 libblkid >= 2.17 and running on a kernel >= 2.6.31, otherwise they will
179 behave as the none --align value.
181 libparted: new functions to set per disk (instead of per partition) flags:
184 ped_disk_is_flag_available()
185 ped_disk_flag_get_name()
186 ped_disk_flag_get_by_name()
189 libparted: new per disk flag: PED_DISK_CYLINDER_ALIGNMENT. This flag
190 (which defaults to true) controls if disk types for which cylinder alignment
191 is optional do cylinder alignment when a new partition gets added.
193 libparted: new functions to return per-partition-table-type limits:
194 - ped_disk_max_partition_start_sector: Return the largest representable
195 start sector number for a given "disk".
196 - ped_disk_max_partition_length: Return the maximum partition length
199 new command "align-check TYPE N" to determine whether the starting sector
200 of partition N is TYPE(minimal|optimal)-aligned for the disk. E.g.,
201 parted -s /dev/sda align-check min 1 && echo partition 1 is min-aligned
202 parted -s /dev/sda align-check opt 2 && echo partition 2 is opt-aligned
203 The same libblkid and kernel version requirements apply as for --align
205 Add functions to libparted to get minimal and optimal alignment
206 information from devices:
207 ped_device_get_minimal_aligned_constraint()
208 ped_device_get_optimal_aligned_constraint()
209 ped_device_get_minimum_alignment()
210 ped_device_get_optimum_alignment()
211 The same libblkid and kernel version requirements apply as for --align
213 Add ped_disk_get_partition_alignment() function to libparted to get
214 information about alignment enforced by the disk type.
218 parted can once again create partition tables on loop devices.
219 Before, "parted -s /dev/loop0 mklabel gpt" would fail.
220 [bug introduced in parted-1.9.0]
222 improved >512-byte sector support: for example, printing a table on a
223 4k-sector disk would show "Sector size (logical/physical): 4096B/512B",
224 when the sizes should have been "4096B/4096B".
226 gpt tables are more rigorously checked; before, partition entry array CRCs
227 were not checked, and we would mistakenly use the AlternateLBA member of a
228 known-corrupt primary table.
230 improved dasd disk support, in previous versions calling
231 ped_disk_new_fresh() or ped_disk_duplicate() on a dasd type PedDisk
232 would fail. This is fixed now.
234 handle device nodes created by lvm build with udev synchronisation enabled
237 when printing tables, parted no longer truncates flag names
240 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
244 Parted now supports disks with sector size larger than 512 bytes.
245 Before this release, Parted could operate only on disks with a sector
246 size of 512 bytes. However, disk manufacturers are already making disks
247 with an exposed hardware sector size of 4096 bytes. Prior versions of
248 Parted cannot even read a partition table on such a device, not to
249 mention create or manipulate existing partition tables.
250 Due to internal design and time constraints, the following
251 less-common partition table types are currently disabled:
252 amiga, bsd, aix, pc98
253 "bsd" and "amiga" are mostly done, but had a few minor problems,
254 so may remain disabled until someone requests that they be revived.
258 big-endian systems can once again read GPT partition tables
259 [bug introduced in parted-1.9.0]
261 ped_partition_is_busy no longer calls libparted's exception handler,
262 since doing so caused trouble with anaconda/pyparted when operating on
265 Partitions in a GPT table are no longer assigned the "microsoft
266 reserved partition" type. Before this change, each partition would
267 be listed with a type of "msftres" by default.
270 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.9.0 (2009-07-23) [stable]
274 parted now preserves the protective MBR (PMBR) in GPT type labels.
275 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2008-December/\
277 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-parted/2008-12/msg00015.html
279 gpt_read now uses SizeOfPartitionEntry instead of the size of
280 GuidPartitionEntry_t. This ensures that *all* of the partition
281 entries are correctly read.
282 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2008-December/\
284 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/attachments/\
285 20081202/b7c0528d/attachment.txt
287 mklabel (interactive mode) now correctly asks for confirmation, when
288 replacing an existent label, without outputting an error message.
289 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2009-January/\
292 resize now handles FAT16 file systems with a 64k cluster. This
293 configuration is not common, but it is possible.
294 http://parted.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/ticket/207
296 parted now ignores devices of the type /dev/md* when probing. These
297 types of devices should be handled by the device-mapper capabilities
299 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2009-April/\
302 The parted documentation now describes the differences in the options
303 passed to mkpart for the label types.
304 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2009-April/\
307 ** Changes in behavior
309 include/parted/beos.h, include/parted/gnu.h and include/parted/linux.h
310 have been removed. The symbols contained in these files (GNUSpecific,
311 ped_device_new_from_store, BEOSSpecific, LinuxSpecific, LINUX_SPECIFIC)
312 were moved to the individual files that need them.
314 In libparted, the linux-swap "filesystem" types are now called
315 "linux-swap(v0)" and "linux-swap(v1)" rather than "linux-swap(old)"
316 and "linux-swap(new)" as in parted 1.8, or "linux-swap" as in older
317 versions; "old" and "new" generally make poor names, and v1 is the
318 only format supported by current Linux kernels. Aliases for all
319 previous names are available.
321 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.8.1 (2007-12-17) [stable]
323 ** FIXME: fill in details
325 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.8 (2007-08-09) [stable]
327 ** GNU parted is now licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3
328 or higher. See the COPYING file for more details.
331 - Add compute_block_counts() to improve ext2fs support.
332 - Properly detect 'ext2 fs too small' cases.
333 - Move formatting commands out of translatable strings.
334 - Read an msdos partition table from a device with 2K sectors.
335 - Remove always-false "Unable to open" diagnostic in ped_disk_new(),
336 leave the "unrecognized disk label" diagnostic.
337 - Don't leak partition table buffer in amiga_read().
338 - Don't read/write initialized memory with DEBUG turned on off for
339 'mklabel bsd' and 'mklabel amiga' command calls.
340 - Turn off DEBUG in libparted.c to avoid initializing all allocated
342 - Correct handling of HeaderSize field in GPT labels.
343 - Fix block number used when checking for ext2 fs state.
344 - Add detection support for Xen virtual block devices (/dev/xvd*).
345 - When reading DASD labels, check the filesystem type as well as
346 partition flags to determine what's on the partition.
347 - Add _dm_probe_all() from Debian to probe for all device-mapper
351 - Fixed exception handling in mkpart and mkpartfs commands.
352 - Add the --dry-run option to the partprobe command.
353 - Update docs: cannot specify 'primary' for a partition on a loop
355 - Remove unused functions (get_spaces).
356 - Fix off-by-one error in str_list_print_wrap().
357 - Use xmalloc() and xrealloc() to check return values.
358 - Fix invalid command line argument handling.
359 - Close memory leaks in parted.c and table.c.
360 - Fix warnings when compiling with translation support enabled.
361 - Use a consistent prompt when asking for a file system type.
362 - Update docs: don't reference old versions of gzip.
365 - Improve the testing framework in the tests/ subdirectory. Build out
366 more of the testing scripts so we can start using that to ensure we
367 don't introduce regressions in releases.
368 - Support testing with tmpfs filesystems on Linux.
369 - Work around inadequate libreadline in the configure script.
370 - Don't include config.h from internal headers.
372 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.7 (2007-05-09) [stable]
375 - Prevent compilation of DASD code on GNU Hurd systems.
376 - Integrate new unit testing framework for parted and libparted.
377 - Fix primary partition cylinder alignment error for DOS disk labels.
378 - Use PED_PARTITION_NORMAL in place of PED_PARTITION_PRIMARY.
379 - Avoid segfault due to a double free on reiserfs support.
382 - Fix script mode (-s) for mkfs command in parted.
383 - Suppress "you are not superuser..." warning in script mode.
384 - Fix off-by-one bug in parted when displaying information about the
386 - Do not translate partition names in the 'parted print' command.
387 This causes problems for non-Latin-based character sets.
388 - Send errors to stderr rather than stdout.
389 - Handle command line options independent of the order.
390 - Abort on any invalid option and handle -v and -h first.
391 - Only display the update /etc/fstab message when there has been a
392 change to the disk (a shorter and more direct message too).
394 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.6 (2007-03-20) [stable]
396 ** Revert the implementation of the linux-swap(new) and linux-swap(old) types.
397 The type is 'linux-swap' for v1, v2, and s1suspend swap partitions on Linux.
399 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.5 (2007-03-20) [stable]
401 ** Another minor update. Both versions 1.8.3 and 1.8.4 lacked po translation
402 files. These are included with version 1.8.5.
404 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.4 (2007-03-19) [stable]
406 ** Minor bug fix release for 1.8.3 to fix build issues on various
408 - Use 'uname -m' to determine if we build on System Z or not.
409 - Include <parted/vtoc.h> in <parted/fdasd.h> for format1_label_t
411 - Remove unused variables in libparted/arch/linux.c (-Werror).
412 - Check return values on fgets() and asprint() in libparted/arch/linux.c
414 - Check for tgetent() in libtinfo in the configure script.
415 - Move some macro definitions in <parted/disk.h> to fix a compile
416 problem with gcc-4.1.2 as indicated here:
417 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-parted/2007-03/msg00008.html
419 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.3 (2007-03-16) [stable]
422 - Header file clean ups.
423 - Sync the linux-swap header according to the Linux kernel sources.
424 - Enable support for swsusp partitions and the ability to differentiate
425 between old and new versions of linux-swap partitions.
426 - Renaming PARTITION_EXT to PARTITION_DOS_EXT in the DOS disklabel
427 code (consitency with Linux kernel source).
428 - Added libparted.pc pkg-config file.
429 - Remove unused functions, ifdefs, and other code.
430 - Deprecate ped_[register|unregister]_disk_type in favor of
431 ped_disk_type_[register|unregister].
432 - Small test program fixes (in label.c and common.c).
433 - Make functions const-correct.
434 - Handle systems where libreadline is not available.
435 - Preserve starting sector for primary NTFS 3.1 partitions on DOS
437 - Handle 2048-byte logical sectors in linux_read().
438 - Use PED_SECTOR_SIZE_DEFAULT macro in place of 512.
439 - Don't assume logical sector size is <= 512B on AIX.
440 - Detect HFS write failure.
441 - Use mkstemp() in place of mktemp().
442 - Added HFS+ resize support.
443 - Don't build DASD support on non-zSeries hardware.
446 - Use fputs() and putchar() in place for printf(), when possible.
447 - Detect/report stdout write errors.
448 - Accept the --version and --help options.
449 - Fix memory leaks in parted(8).
452 - Synchronize the manual page and --help documentation.
453 - GNU autoconf and automake updates.
454 - 'gcc -Wall -Wshadow' warning cleanups.
455 - Don't define _GNU_SOURCE manually.
456 - Documentation updates and cleanups (AUTHORS, copyright notices,
458 - Use gnulib (http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/).
460 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.2 (2007-01-12) [stable]
463 - Add the ped_device_cache_remove() function to remove a device from
464 the cache. This is necessary for some things that use libparted,
466 - Fix a segfault in ped_assert() where the wrong pointer is freed in
467 the backtrace handler.
468 - Only call _disk_warn_loss(disk) in do_mklabel() if disk is not NULL.
469 Fixes a segfault when initializing new volumes.
470 - Dynamically allocate space for exception messages.
471 - Output a backtrace when catching SEGV_MAPPER or a general SIGSEGV.
474 - Destroy all objects before return when called with --list or --all
476 - Zero sized device is shown as 0.00B and not -0.00kB.
477 - Implement 'print devices' command.
478 - Alias 'print list' to 'print all'.
479 - Alias 'mktable' to 'mklabel'.
482 - Other bug fixes, documentation updates, and translation improvements.
483 - Code and API clean-ups.
485 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.1 (2006-12-04) [stable]
488 - Rework backtrace support.
490 - Added --enable-selinux configure option to enable linking libparted with
491 libselinux and libsepol.
492 - Disable ext2fs resize for now, tell user to use resize2fs.
495 - Fix loop in print_all().
496 - Introduce the -list command-line switch.
497 - Make mktable aliased to mklabel.
498 - Warn before mklabel and mkfs.
499 - Code cleanups in _partition_warn_busy(), _disk_warn_busy(),
500 _partition_warn_loss(), and _disk_warn_loss().
501 - Avoid warning about user permissions when using --version.
502 - Fix 'print' command help.
503 - Proper print when there are no extended partitions, but partition names.
506 - Generate SHA-1 digest of the archive files and upload those along with the
507 actual archive files.
508 - Update translation files.
509 - Remove automatically generated files from version control.
511 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.0 (2006-11-17) [stable]
515 - Correctly handle disks with non-512 byte sector sizes
516 - Support LUN resizing (see new space, allow parted to use it)
517 - Prevent overlap of LastUsableLBA and PartitionEntryLBA in backup GPT
518 - Prevent SIGFPE when FAT sector size is 0
519 - Add ped_exception_get_handler()
520 - DASD support for IBM zSeries systems
521 - AIX disk label support
522 - Detect Promise SX8 storage devices
523 - Macintosh (ppc and x86) disk label improvements:
524 - Prevent LVM and RAID partition types from corrupting the table
525 - Fix removal of driver partition
526 - Add support binary units (MiB, KiB, GiB)
527 - In ped_register_disk_type(), handle disk_types==NULL case
528 - In ped_unregister_disk_type(), handle case where type is not registered
529 - Fix geometry read problems on 64-bit Macs (and probably other 64-bit systems)
530 - Add support for /dev/mapper devices via libdevmapper library
531 - Detect Apple_Boot partition types correctly on MacOS X 10.4 systems
534 - Various bug fixes, signal handling fixes, and spelling error fixes
535 - UI improvements to display more information about the disk and transport
538 ========================================================================
540 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
542 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
543 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
544 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
545 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
546 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
547 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.