1 GNU parted NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 libparted: no longer aborts when reading a truncated GPT-formatted device
9 libparted: works with a two-component linux kernel version number like 3.0
12 * Noteworthy changes in release 3.0 (2011-05-30) [stable]
16 Fix numerous small leaks in both the library and the UI.
18 ** Changes in behavior
20 Remove all FS-related (file system-related) sub-commands; these commands
21 are no longer recognized because they were all dependent on parted "knowing"
22 too much about file system: mkpartfs, mkfs, cp, move, check, resize.
23 This change removes not just the user interface bits, but also the
24 library functions and nearly all of the underlying FS-munging code.
25 The code embedded in Parted by which it knew about those file systems
26 was so old, unmaintainable and buggy that while seemingly drastic,
27 this change is like removing a gangrenous toe.
29 Here is the list of removed functions:
31 ped_file_system_clobber
33 ped_file_system_create
37 ped_file_system_resize
38 ped_file_system_get_create_constraint
39 ped_file_system_get_resize_constraint
40 ped_file_system_get_copy_constraint
42 This change also removes the corresponding function members
43 from "struct _PedFileSystemOps":
45 clobber open create close check copy resize get_create_constraint
46 get_resize_constraint get_copy_constraint
49 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.4 (2011-05-18) [stable]
53 parted no longer allows the modification of certain in-use partitions.
54 In particular, before this fix, parted would permit removal or modification
55 of any in-use partition on a dmraid and any in-use partition beyond the 15th
56 on a regular scsi disk.
58 Improve support of DASD devices on the s390 architecture.
59 Parted now supports all DASD types (CKD and FBA), DASD formats (CDL,
60 LDL, CMS non-reserved, and CMS reserved), and DASD drivers (ECKD, FBA,
61 and DIAG) in all combinations supported by the Linux kernel. As before,
62 only CDL format on CKD DASD using the ECKD driver is supported for
63 read-write operations (create, delete, move, re-size, etc.). However,
64 the implicit partition present on LDL- and CMS-formatted disks is now
65 correctly recognized for read-only operations. In detail:
67 - parted now correctly handles LDL-format disks with a block
68 size other than 4096 (bug fix)
70 - parted now recognizes the CMS disk format, both reserved
71 and non-reserved (enhancement)
73 - parted now supports FBA DASD devices (enhancement)
75 - parted now supports the DIAG driver when running in a
76 virtual machine under z/VM (enhancement)
78 libparted: raise the limit on the maximum start sector and the
79 maximum number of sectors in a "loop" partition table from 2^32 to 2^64.
80 [bug introduced in parted-2.1]
82 libparted once again recognizes a whole-disk FAT partition
83 [bug introduced in parted-1.9.0]
85 libparted now recognizes scsi disks with a high major (128-135) as scsi
88 an msdos partition table on a very small device (smaller than one cylinder)
89 is now recognized. [bug introduced in parted-2.2]
91 libparted: zero-length devices (other than files) are ignored rather than
92 throwing an exception.
94 libparted: gpt label creation can no longer divide by zero with a
95 defective device or when a concurrent writer modifies the PE-size
96 bytes in the small interval between the write and subsequent read
97 of the primary GPT header.
99 ** Changes in behavior
101 "parted $dev print" now prints information about the device (model, size,
102 transport, sector size) even when it fails to recognize the disk label.
104 specifying partition start or end values using MiB, GiB, etc. suffixes
105 now makes parted do what I want, i.e., use that precise value, and not
106 some other that is up to 500KiB or 500MiB away from what I specified.
107 Before, to get that behavior, you would have had to use carefully chosen
108 values with units of bytes ("B") or sectors ("s") to obtain the same
109 result, and with sectors, your usage would not be portable between devices
110 with varying sector sizes. This change does not affect how parted handles
111 suffixes like KB, MB, GB, etc.
114 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.3 (2010-05-28) [stable]
118 parted now recognizes ATA over Ethernet (AoE) devices
120 parted now recognizes Linux Software RAID Arrays
122 libparted has a new partition flag to check for diagnostic (aka recovery
123 or reserved) partitions: PED_PARTITION_DIAG
127 When libparted deferenced a /dev/mapper/foo symlink, it would keep the
128 resulting /dev/dm-N name and sometimes use it later, even though it
129 had since become stale and invalid. It no longer stores the result
130 of dereferencing a /dev/mapper symlink.
132 libparted's msdos_partition_is_flag_available function now always reports
133 that the "hidden" flag is not available for an extended partition.
134 Similarly, msdos_partition_get_flag(p,PED_PARTITION_HIDDEN) always returns 0
135 for an extended partition.
137 libparted uses a more accurate heuristic to distinguish between
138 ext4 and ext3 partitions.
140 libparted now properly checks the return value of dm_task_run when
141 operating on devicemapper devices.
143 allow using ped_device_cache_remove(dev) followed by a (later)
144 ped_device_destroy() without corrupting the device cache.
146 when creating an ext2 file system[*], Parted no longer creates an
147 invalid one when its size is 2TiB or larger.
148 [*] Remember, now all FS-creation operations are deprecated in Parted.
149 This is not an indicator that we'll be supporting this code.
150 On the contrary, it is slated to be removed.
152 ** Changes in behavior
154 libparted no longer issues an exception/warning about >512-byte
155 sector support being "HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL". It seems to have matured
156 enough to be usable at least with GPT and MSDOS partition tables.
159 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.2 (2010-02-26) [stable]
161 ** Changes in behavior
163 The default alignment (--align option) for newly created partitions has
164 been changed to optimal.
168 The ped_device_get_*_alignment() functions now return a sane default
169 value instead of NULL when the so called topology information is incomplete.
170 The default minimum alignment aligns to physical sector size, the default
171 optimal alignment is 1MiB, which is what vista and windows 7 do.
175 Parted no longer uses a physical sector size of 0 or of any other
176 value smaller than the logical sector size.
178 dos: creating an HFS or HFS+ partition in an msdos partition table
179 used to set the partition type to 0x83. That is wrong. The required
180 number is 0xaf, and that is what is used now.
182 gpt: read-only operation could clobber MBR part of hybrid GPT+MBR table
183 [bug introduced in parted-2.1]
185 gpt: a read-only operation like "parted $dev print" would overwrite $dev's
186 protective MBR when exactly one of the primary and backup GPT tables was
188 [bug introduced prior to parted-1.8.0]
190 sun: the version, sanity and nparts VTOC fields were ignored by libparted.
191 Those fields are properly initialized now. The nparts (number of partitions)
192 field is initialized to 8 (max. number of sun partitions) rather that to a
193 real number of partitions. This solution is compatible with Linux kernel
196 "make install" no longer installs tests programs named disk and label
198 libparted: try harder to inform kernel of partition changes.
199 Previously when editing partitions, occasionally the kernel would
200 fail to be informed of partition changes. When this happened future
201 problems would occur because the kernel had incorrect information.
202 For example, if this problem arose when resizing or creating a
203 new partition, then an incorrect partition size might be displayed
204 or a user might encounter a failure to format or delete a newly
205 created partition, respectively.
207 libparted: committing a disk that was returned by ped_disk_duplicate
208 would always result in ped_disk_clobber being called (and thus the first
209 and last 9KiB of the disk being zeroed), even if the duplicated disk,
210 was not returned by ped_disk_fresh().
213 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.1 (2009-12-20) [stable]
217 new --align=<align> commandline option which can have the following values:
218 none: Use the minimum alignment allowed by the disk type
219 cylinder: Align partitions to cylinders (the default)
220 minimal: Use minimum alignment as given by the disk topology information
221 optimal: Use optimum alignment as given by the disk topology information
222 The minimal and optimal values will use layout information provided by the
223 disk to align the logical partition table addresses to actual physical
224 blocks on the disks. The mininal value uses the minimum aligment needed to
225 align the partition properly to physical blocks, which avoids performance
226 degradation. Where as the optimal value uses a multiple of the physical
227 block size in a way that guarantees optimal performance.
228 The min and opt values will only work when compiled with
229 libblkid >= 2.17 and running on a kernel >= 2.6.31, otherwise they will
230 behave as the none --align value.
232 libparted: new functions to set per disk (instead of per partition) flags:
235 ped_disk_is_flag_available()
236 ped_disk_flag_get_name()
237 ped_disk_flag_get_by_name()
240 libparted: new per disk flag: PED_DISK_CYLINDER_ALIGNMENT. This flag
241 (which defaults to true) controls if disk types for which cylinder alignment
242 is optional do cylinder alignment when a new partition gets added.
244 libparted: new functions to return per-partition-table-type limits:
245 - ped_disk_max_partition_start_sector: Return the largest representable
246 start sector number for a given "disk".
247 - ped_disk_max_partition_length: Return the maximum partition length
250 new command "align-check TYPE N" to determine whether the starting sector
251 of partition N is TYPE(minimal|optimal)-aligned for the disk. E.g.,
252 parted -s /dev/sda align-check min 1 && echo partition 1 is min-aligned
253 parted -s /dev/sda align-check opt 2 && echo partition 2 is opt-aligned
254 The same libblkid and kernel version requirements apply as for --align
256 Add functions to libparted to get minimal and optimal alignment
257 information from devices:
258 ped_device_get_minimal_aligned_constraint()
259 ped_device_get_optimal_aligned_constraint()
260 ped_device_get_minimum_alignment()
261 ped_device_get_optimum_alignment()
262 The same libblkid and kernel version requirements apply as for --align
264 Add ped_disk_get_partition_alignment() function to libparted to get
265 information about alignment enforced by the disk type.
269 parted can once again create partition tables on loop devices.
270 Before, "parted -s /dev/loop0 mklabel gpt" would fail.
271 [bug introduced in parted-1.9.0]
273 improved >512-byte sector support: for example, printing a table on a
274 4k-sector disk would show "Sector size (logical/physical): 4096B/512B",
275 when the sizes should have been "4096B/4096B".
277 gpt tables are more rigorously checked; before, partition entry array CRCs
278 were not checked, and we would mistakenly use the AlternateLBA member of a
279 known-corrupt primary table.
281 improved dasd disk support, in previous versions calling
282 ped_disk_new_fresh() or ped_disk_duplicate() on a dasd type PedDisk
283 would fail. This is fixed now.
285 handle device nodes created by lvm build with udev synchronisation enabled
288 when printing tables, parted no longer truncates flag names
291 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
295 Parted now supports disks with sector size larger than 512 bytes.
296 Before this release, Parted could operate only on disks with a sector
297 size of 512 bytes. However, disk manufacturers are already making disks
298 with an exposed hardware sector size of 4096 bytes. Prior versions of
299 Parted cannot even read a partition table on such a device, not to
300 mention create or manipulate existing partition tables.
301 Due to internal design and time constraints, the following
302 less-common partition table types are currently disabled:
303 amiga, bsd, aix, pc98
304 "bsd" and "amiga" are mostly done, but had a few minor problems,
305 so may remain disabled until someone requests that they be revived.
309 big-endian systems can once again read GPT partition tables
310 [bug introduced in parted-1.9.0]
312 ped_partition_is_busy no longer calls libparted's exception handler,
313 since doing so caused trouble with anaconda/pyparted when operating on
316 Partitions in a GPT table are no longer assigned the "microsoft
317 reserved partition" type. Before this change, each partition would
318 be listed with a type of "msftres" by default.
321 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.9.0 (2009-07-23) [stable]
325 parted now preserves the protective MBR (PMBR) in GPT type labels.
326 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2008-December/\
328 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-parted/2008-12/msg00015.html
330 gpt_read now uses SizeOfPartitionEntry instead of the size of
331 GuidPartitionEntry_t. This ensures that *all* of the partition
332 entries are correctly read.
333 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2008-December/\
335 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/attachments/\
336 20081202/b7c0528d/attachment.txt
338 mklabel (interactive mode) now correctly asks for confirmation, when
339 replacing an existent label, without outputting an error message.
340 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2009-January/\
343 resize now handles FAT16 file systems with a 64k cluster. This
344 configuration is not common, but it is possible.
345 http://parted.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/ticket/207
347 parted now ignores devices of the type /dev/md* when probing. These
348 types of devices should be handled by the device-mapper capabilities
350 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2009-April/\
353 The parted documentation now describes the differences in the options
354 passed to mkpart for the label types.
355 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2009-April/\
358 ** Changes in behavior
360 include/parted/beos.h, include/parted/gnu.h and include/parted/linux.h
361 have been removed. The symbols contained in these files (GNUSpecific,
362 ped_device_new_from_store, BEOSSpecific, LinuxSpecific, LINUX_SPECIFIC)
363 were moved to the individual files that need them.
365 In libparted, the linux-swap "filesystem" types are now called
366 "linux-swap(v0)" and "linux-swap(v1)" rather than "linux-swap(old)"
367 and "linux-swap(new)" as in parted 1.8, or "linux-swap" as in older
368 versions; "old" and "new" generally make poor names, and v1 is the
369 only format supported by current Linux kernels. Aliases for all
370 previous names are available.
372 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.8.1 (2007-12-17) [stable]
374 ** FIXME: fill in details
376 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.8 (2007-08-09) [stable]
378 ** GNU parted is now licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3
379 or higher. See the COPYING file for more details.
382 - Add compute_block_counts() to improve ext2fs support.
383 - Properly detect 'ext2 fs too small' cases.
384 - Move formatting commands out of translatable strings.
385 - Read an msdos partition table from a device with 2K sectors.
386 - Remove always-false "Unable to open" diagnostic in ped_disk_new(),
387 leave the "unrecognized disk label" diagnostic.
388 - Don't leak partition table buffer in amiga_read().
389 - Don't read/write initialized memory with DEBUG turned on off for
390 'mklabel bsd' and 'mklabel amiga' command calls.
391 - Turn off DEBUG in libparted.c to avoid initializing all allocated
393 - Correct handling of HeaderSize field in GPT labels.
394 - Fix block number used when checking for ext2 fs state.
395 - Add detection support for Xen virtual block devices (/dev/xvd*).
396 - When reading DASD labels, check the filesystem type as well as
397 partition flags to determine what's on the partition.
398 - Add _dm_probe_all() from Debian to probe for all device-mapper
402 - Fixed exception handling in mkpart and mkpartfs commands.
403 - Add the --dry-run option to the partprobe command.
404 - Update docs: cannot specify 'primary' for a partition on a loop
406 - Remove unused functions (get_spaces).
407 - Fix off-by-one error in str_list_print_wrap().
408 - Use xmalloc() and xrealloc() to check return values.
409 - Fix invalid command line argument handling.
410 - Close memory leaks in parted.c and table.c.
411 - Fix warnings when compiling with translation support enabled.
412 - Use a consistent prompt when asking for a file system type.
413 - Update docs: don't reference old versions of gzip.
416 - Improve the testing framework in the tests/ subdirectory. Build out
417 more of the testing scripts so we can start using that to ensure we
418 don't introduce regressions in releases.
419 - Support testing with tmpfs filesystems on Linux.
420 - Work around inadequate libreadline in the configure script.
421 - Don't include config.h from internal headers.
423 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.7 (2007-05-09) [stable]
426 - Prevent compilation of DASD code on GNU Hurd systems.
427 - Integrate new unit testing framework for parted and libparted.
428 - Fix primary partition cylinder alignment error for DOS disk labels.
429 - Use PED_PARTITION_NORMAL in place of PED_PARTITION_PRIMARY.
430 - Avoid segfault due to a double free on reiserfs support.
433 - Fix script mode (-s) for mkfs command in parted.
434 - Suppress "you are not superuser..." warning in script mode.
435 - Fix off-by-one bug in parted when displaying information about the
437 - Do not translate partition names in the 'parted print' command.
438 This causes problems for non-Latin-based character sets.
439 - Send errors to stderr rather than stdout.
440 - Handle command line options independent of the order.
441 - Abort on any invalid option and handle -v and -h first.
442 - Only display the update /etc/fstab message when there has been a
443 change to the disk (a shorter and more direct message too).
445 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.6 (2007-03-20) [stable]
447 ** Revert the implementation of the linux-swap(new) and linux-swap(old) types.
448 The type is 'linux-swap' for v1, v2, and s1suspend swap partitions on Linux.
450 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.5 (2007-03-20) [stable]
452 ** Another minor update. Both versions 1.8.3 and 1.8.4 lacked po translation
453 files. These are included with version 1.8.5.
455 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.4 (2007-03-19) [stable]
457 ** Minor bug fix release for 1.8.3 to fix build issues on various
459 - Use 'uname -m' to determine if we build on System Z or not.
460 - Include <parted/vtoc.h> in <parted/fdasd.h> for format1_label_t
462 - Remove unused variables in libparted/arch/linux.c (-Werror).
463 - Check return values on fgets() and asprint() in libparted/arch/linux.c
465 - Check for tgetent() in libtinfo in the configure script.
466 - Move some macro definitions in <parted/disk.h> to fix a compile
467 problem with gcc-4.1.2 as indicated here:
468 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-parted/2007-03/msg00008.html
470 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.3 (2007-03-16) [stable]
473 - Header file clean ups.
474 - Sync the linux-swap header according to the Linux kernel sources.
475 - Enable support for swsusp partitions and the ability to differentiate
476 between old and new versions of linux-swap partitions.
477 - Renaming PARTITION_EXT to PARTITION_DOS_EXT in the DOS disklabel
478 code (consitency with Linux kernel source).
479 - Added libparted.pc pkg-config file.
480 - Remove unused functions, ifdefs, and other code.
481 - Deprecate ped_[register|unregister]_disk_type in favor of
482 ped_disk_type_[register|unregister].
483 - Small test program fixes (in label.c and common.c).
484 - Make functions const-correct.
485 - Handle systems where libreadline is not available.
486 - Preserve starting sector for primary NTFS 3.1 partitions on DOS
488 - Handle 2048-byte logical sectors in linux_read().
489 - Use PED_SECTOR_SIZE_DEFAULT macro in place of 512.
490 - Don't assume logical sector size is <= 512B on AIX.
491 - Detect HFS write failure.
492 - Use mkstemp() in place of mktemp().
493 - Added HFS+ resize support.
494 - Don't build DASD support on non-zSeries hardware.
497 - Use fputs() and putchar() in place for printf(), when possible.
498 - Detect/report stdout write errors.
499 - Accept the --version and --help options.
500 - Fix memory leaks in parted(8).
503 - Synchronize the manual page and --help documentation.
504 - GNU autoconf and automake updates.
505 - 'gcc -Wall -Wshadow' warning cleanups.
506 - Don't define _GNU_SOURCE manually.
507 - Documentation updates and cleanups (AUTHORS, copyright notices,
509 - Use gnulib (http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/).
511 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.2 (2007-01-12) [stable]
514 - Add the ped_device_cache_remove() function to remove a device from
515 the cache. This is necessary for some things that use libparted,
517 - Fix a segfault in ped_assert() where the wrong pointer is freed in
518 the backtrace handler.
519 - Only call _disk_warn_loss(disk) in do_mklabel() if disk is not NULL.
520 Fixes a segfault when initializing new volumes.
521 - Dynamically allocate space for exception messages.
522 - Output a backtrace when catching SEGV_MAPPER or a general SIGSEGV.
525 - Destroy all objects before return when called with --list or --all
527 - Zero sized device is shown as 0.00B and not -0.00kB.
528 - Implement 'print devices' command.
529 - Alias 'print list' to 'print all'.
530 - Alias 'mktable' to 'mklabel'.
533 - Other bug fixes, documentation updates, and translation improvements.
534 - Code and API clean-ups.
536 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.1 (2006-12-04) [stable]
539 - Rework backtrace support.
541 - Added --enable-selinux configure option to enable linking libparted with
542 libselinux and libsepol.
543 - Disable ext2fs resize for now, tell user to use resize2fs.
546 - Fix loop in print_all().
547 - Introduce the -list command-line switch.
548 - Make mktable aliased to mklabel.
549 - Warn before mklabel and mkfs.
550 - Code cleanups in _partition_warn_busy(), _disk_warn_busy(),
551 _partition_warn_loss(), and _disk_warn_loss().
552 - Avoid warning about user permissions when using --version.
553 - Fix 'print' command help.
554 - Proper print when there are no extended partitions, but partition names.
557 - Generate SHA-1 digest of the archive files and upload those along with the
558 actual archive files.
559 - Update translation files.
560 - Remove automatically generated files from version control.
562 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.0 (2006-11-17) [stable]
566 - Correctly handle disks with non-512 byte sector sizes
567 - Support LUN resizing (see new space, allow parted to use it)
568 - Prevent overlap of LastUsableLBA and PartitionEntryLBA in backup GPT
569 - Prevent SIGFPE when FAT sector size is 0
570 - Add ped_exception_get_handler()
571 - DASD support for IBM zSeries systems
572 - AIX disk label support
573 - Detect Promise SX8 storage devices
574 - Macintosh (ppc and x86) disk label improvements:
575 - Prevent LVM and RAID partition types from corrupting the table
576 - Fix removal of driver partition
577 - Add support binary units (MiB, KiB, GiB)
578 - In ped_register_disk_type(), handle disk_types==NULL case
579 - In ped_unregister_disk_type(), handle case where type is not registered
580 - Fix geometry read problems on 64-bit Macs (and probably other 64-bit systems)
581 - Add support for /dev/mapper devices via libdevmapper library
582 - Detect Apple_Boot partition types correctly on MacOS X 10.4 systems
585 - Various bug fixes, signal handling fixes, and spelling error fixes
586 - UI improvements to display more information about the disk and transport
589 ========================================================================
591 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
593 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
594 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
595 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
596 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
597 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
598 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.