1 GNU parted NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
7 Parted now supports disks with sector size larger than 512 bytes.
8 Before this release, Parted could operate only on disks with a sector
9 size of 512 bytes. However, disk manufacturers are already making disks
10 with an exposed hardware sector size of 4096 bytes. Prior versions of
11 Parted cannot even read a partition table on such a device, not to
12 mention create or manipulate existing partition tables.
13 Due to internal design and time constraints, the following
14 less-common partition table types are currently disabled:
16 "bsd" and "amiga" are mostly done, but had a few minor problems,
17 so may remain disabled until someone requests that they be revived.
21 big-endian systems can once again read GPT partition tables
22 [bug introduced in parted-1.9.0]
24 ped_partition_is_busy no longer calls libparted's exception handler,
25 since doing so caused trouble with anaconda/pyparted when operating on
28 Partitions in a GPT table are no longer assigned the "microsoft
29 reserved partition" type. Before this change, each partition would
30 be listed with a type of "msftres" by default.
33 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.9.0 (2009-07-23) [stable]
37 parted now preserves the protective MBR (PMBR) in GPT type labels.
38 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2008-December/\
40 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-parted/2008-12/msg00015.html
42 gpt_read now uses SizeOfPartitionEntry instead of the size of
43 GuidPartitionEntry_t. This ensures that *all* of the partition
44 entries are correctly read.
45 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2008-December/\
47 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/attachments/\
48 20081202/b7c0528d/attachment.txt
50 mklabel (interactive mode) now correctly asks for confirmation, when
51 replacing an existent label, without outputting an error message.
52 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2009-January/\
55 resize now handles FAT16 file systems with a 64k cluster. This
56 configuration is not common, but it is possible.
57 http://parted.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/ticket/207
59 parted now ignores devices of the type /dev/md* when probing. These
60 types of devices should be handled by the device-mapper capabilities
62 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2009-April/\
65 The parted documentation now describes the differences in the options
66 passed to mkpart for the label types.
67 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2009-April/\
70 ** Changes in behavior
72 include/parted/beos.h, include/parted/gnu.h and include/parted/linux.h
73 have been removed. The symbols contained in these files (GNUSpecific,
74 ped_device_new_from_store, BEOSSpecific, LinuxSpecific, LINUX_SPECIFIC)
75 were moved to the individual files that need them.
77 In libparted, the linux-swap "filesystem" types are now called
78 "linux-swap(v0)" and "linux-swap(v1)" rather than "linux-swap(old)"
79 and "linux-swap(new)" as in parted 1.8, or "linux-swap" as in older
80 versions; "old" and "new" generally make poor names, and v1 is the
81 only format supported by current Linux kernels. Aliases for all
82 previous names are available.
84 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.8.1 (2007-12-17) [stable]
86 ** FIXME: fill in details
88 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.8 (2007-08-09) [stable]
90 ** GNU parted is now licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3
91 or higher. See the COPYING file for more details.
94 - Add compute_block_counts() to improve ext2fs support.
95 - Properly detect 'ext2 fs too small' cases.
96 - Move formatting commands out of translatable strings.
97 - Read an msdos partition table from a device with 2K sectors.
98 - Remove always-false "Unable to open" diagnostic in ped_disk_new(),
99 leave the "unrecognized disk label" diagnostic.
100 - Don't leak partition table buffer in amiga_read().
101 - Don't read/write initialized memory with DEBUG turned on off for
102 'mklabel bsd' and 'mklabel amiga' command calls.
103 - Turn off DEBUG in libparted.c to avoid initializing all allocated
105 - Correct handling of HeaderSize field in GPT labels.
106 - Fix block number used when checking for ext2 fs state.
107 - Add detection support for Xen virtual block devices (/dev/xvd*).
108 - When reading DASD labels, check the filesystem type as well as
109 partition flags to determine what's on the partition.
110 - Add _dm_probe_all() from Debian to probe for all device-mapper
114 - Fixed exception handling in mkpart and mkpartfs commands.
115 - Add the --dry-run option to the partprobe command.
116 - Update docs: cannot specify 'primary' for a partition on a loop
118 - Remove unused functions (get_spaces).
119 - Fix off-by-one error in str_list_print_wrap().
120 - Use xmalloc() and xrealloc() to check return values.
121 - Fix invalid command line argument handling.
122 - Close memory leaks in parted.c and table.c.
123 - Fix warnings when compiling with translation support enabled.
124 - Use a consistent prompt when asking for a file system type.
125 - Update docs: don't reference old versions of gzip.
128 - Improve the testing framework in the tests/ subdirectory. Build out
129 more of the testing scripts so we can start using that to ensure we
130 don't introduce regressions in releases.
131 - Support testing with tmpfs filesystems on Linux.
132 - Work around inadequate libreadline in the configure script.
133 - Don't include config.h from internal headers.
135 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.7 (2007-05-09) [stable]
138 - Prevent compilation of DASD code on GNU Hurd systems.
139 - Integrate new unit testing framework for parted and libparted.
140 - Fix primary partition cylinder alignment error for DOS disk labels.
141 - Use PED_PARTITION_NORMAL in place of PED_PARTITION_PRIMARY.
142 - Avoid segfault due to a double free on reiserfs support.
145 - Fix script mode (-s) for mkfs command in parted.
146 - Suppress "you are not superuser..." warning in script mode.
147 - Fix off-by-one bug in parted when displaying information about the
149 - Do not translate partition names in the 'parted print' command.
150 This causes problems for non-Latin-based character sets.
151 - Send errors to stderr rather than stdout.
152 - Handle command line options independent of the order.
153 - Abort on any invalid option and handle -v and -h first.
154 - Only display the update /etc/fstab message when there has been a
155 change to the disk (a shorter and more direct message too).
157 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.6 (2007-03-20) [stable]
159 ** Revert the implementation of the linux-swap(new) and linux-swap(old) types.
160 The type is 'linux-swap' for v1, v2, and s1suspend swap partitions on Linux.
162 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.5 (2007-03-20) [stable]
164 ** Another minor update. Both versions 1.8.3 and 1.8.4 lacked po translation
165 files. These are included with version 1.8.5.
167 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.4 (2007-03-19) [stable]
169 ** Minor bug fix release for 1.8.3 to fix build issues on various
171 - Use 'uname -m' to determine if we build on System Z or not.
172 - Include <parted/vtoc.h> in <parted/fdasd.h> for format1_label_t
174 - Remove unused variables in libparted/arch/linux.c (-Werror).
175 - Check return values on fgets() and asprint() in libparted/arch/linux.c
177 - Check for tgetent() in libtinfo in the configure script.
178 - Move some macro definitions in <parted/disk.h> to fix a compile
179 problem with gcc-4.1.2 as indicated here:
180 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-parted/2007-03/msg00008.html
182 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.3 (2007-03-16) [stable]
185 - Header file clean ups.
186 - Sync the linux-swap header according to the Linux kernel sources.
187 - Enable support for swsusp partitions and the ability to differentiate
188 between old and new versions of linux-swap partitions.
189 - Renaming PARTITION_EXT to PARTITION_DOS_EXT in the DOS disklabel
190 code (consitency with Linux kernel source).
191 - Added libparted.pc pkg-config file.
192 - Remove unused functions, ifdefs, and other code.
193 - Deprecate ped_[register|unregister]_disk_type in favor of
194 ped_disk_type_[register|unregister].
195 - Small test program fixes (in label.c and common.c).
196 - Make functions const-correct.
197 - Handle systems where libreadline is not available.
198 - Preserve starting sector for primary NTFS 3.1 partitions on DOS
200 - Handle 2048-byte logical sectors in linux_read().
201 - Use PED_SECTOR_SIZE_DEFAULT macro in place of 512.
202 - Don't assume logical sector size is <= 512B on AIX.
203 - Detect HFS write failure.
204 - Use mkstemp() in place of mktemp().
205 - Added HFS+ resize support.
206 - Don't build DASD support on non-zSeries hardware.
209 - Use fputs() and putchar() in place for printf(), when possible.
210 - Detect/report stdout write errors.
211 - Accept the --version and --help options.
212 - Fix memory leaks in parted(8).
215 - Synchronize the manual page and --help documentation.
216 - GNU autoconf and automake updates.
217 - 'gcc -Wall -Wshadow' warning cleanups.
218 - Don't define _GNU_SOURCE manually.
219 - Documentation updates and cleanups (AUTHORS, copyright notices,
221 - Use gnulib (http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/).
223 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.2 (2007-01-12) [stable]
226 - Add the ped_device_cache_remove() function to remove a device from
227 the cache. This is necessary for some things that use libparted,
229 - Fix a segfault in ped_assert() where the wrong pointer is freed in
230 the backtrace handler.
231 - Only call _disk_warn_loss(disk) in do_mklabel() if disk is not NULL.
232 Fixes a segfault when initializing new volumes.
233 - Dynamically allocate space for exception messages.
234 - Output a backtrace when catching SEGV_MAPPER or a general SIGSEGV.
237 - Destroy all objects before return when called with --list or --all
239 - Zero sized device is shown as 0.00B and not -0.00kB.
240 - Implement 'print devices' command.
241 - Alias 'print list' to 'print all'.
242 - Alias 'mktable' to 'mklabel'.
245 - Other bug fixes, documentation updates, and translation improvements.
246 - Code and API clean-ups.
248 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.1 (2006-12-04) [stable]
251 - Rework backtrace support.
253 - Added --enable-selinux configure option to enable linking libparted with
254 libselinux and libsepol.
255 - Disable ext2fs resize for now, tell user to use resize2fs.
258 - Fix loop in print_all().
259 - Introduce the -list command-line switch.
260 - Make mktable aliased to mklabel.
261 - Warn before mklabel and mkfs.
262 - Code cleanups in _partition_warn_busy(), _disk_warn_busy(),
263 _partition_warn_loss(), and _disk_warn_loss().
264 - Avoid warning about user permissions when using --version.
265 - Fix 'print' command help.
266 - Proper print when there are no extended partitions, but partition names.
269 - Generate SHA-1 digest of the archive files and upload those along with the
270 actual archive files.
271 - Update translation files.
272 - Remove automatically generated files from version control.
274 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.0 (2006-11-17) [stable]
278 - Correctly handle disks with non-512 byte sector sizes
279 - Support LUN resizing (see new space, allow parted to use it)
280 - Prevent overlap of LastUsableLBA and PartitionEntryLBA in backup GPT
281 - Prevent SIGFPE when FAT sector size is 0
282 - Add ped_exception_get_handler()
283 - DASD support for IBM zSeries systems
284 - AIX disk label support
285 - Detect Promise SX8 storage devices
286 - Macintosh (ppc and x86) disk label improvements:
287 - Prevent LVM and RAID partition types from corrupting the table
288 - Fix removal of driver partition
289 - Add support binary units (MiB, KiB, GiB)
290 - In ped_register_disk_type(), handle disk_types==NULL case
291 - In ped_unregister_disk_type(), handle case where type is not registered
292 - Fix geometry read problems on 64-bit Macs (and probably other 64-bit systems)
293 - Add support for /dev/mapper devices via libdevmapper library
294 - Detect Apple_Boot partition types correctly on MacOS X 10.4 systems
297 - Various bug fixes, signal handling fixes, and spelling error fixes
298 - UI improvements to display more information about the disk and transport
301 ========================================================================
303 Copyright (C) 2001-2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
305 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
306 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
307 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
308 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
309 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
310 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.