1 GNU parted NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 libparted: works with a two-component linux kernel version number like 3.0
10 * Noteworthy changes in release 3.0 (2011-05-30) [stable]
14 Fix numerous small leaks in both the library and the UI.
16 ** Changes in behavior
18 Remove all FS-related (file system-related) sub-commands; these commands
19 are no longer recognized because they were all dependent on parted "knowing"
20 too much about file system: mkpartfs, mkfs, cp, move, check, resize.
21 This change removes not just the user interface bits, but also the
22 library functions and nearly all of the underlying FS-munging code.
23 The code embedded in Parted by which it knew about those file systems
24 was so old, unmaintainable and buggy that while seemingly drastic,
25 this change is like removing a gangrenous toe.
27 Here is the list of removed functions:
29 ped_file_system_clobber
31 ped_file_system_create
35 ped_file_system_resize
36 ped_file_system_get_create_constraint
37 ped_file_system_get_resize_constraint
38 ped_file_system_get_copy_constraint
40 This change also removes the corresponding function members
41 from "struct _PedFileSystemOps":
43 clobber open create close check copy resize get_create_constraint
44 get_resize_constraint get_copy_constraint
47 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.4 (2011-05-18) [stable]
51 parted no longer allows the modification of certain in-use partitions.
52 In particular, before this fix, parted would permit removal or modification
53 of any in-use partition on a dmraid and any in-use partition beyond the 15th
54 on a regular scsi disk.
56 Improve support of DASD devices on the s390 architecture.
57 Parted now supports all DASD types (CKD and FBA), DASD formats (CDL,
58 LDL, CMS non-reserved, and CMS reserved), and DASD drivers (ECKD, FBA,
59 and DIAG) in all combinations supported by the Linux kernel. As before,
60 only CDL format on CKD DASD using the ECKD driver is supported for
61 read-write operations (create, delete, move, re-size, etc.). However,
62 the implicit partition present on LDL- and CMS-formatted disks is now
63 correctly recognized for read-only operations. In detail:
65 - parted now correctly handles LDL-format disks with a block
66 size other than 4096 (bug fix)
68 - parted now recognizes the CMS disk format, both reserved
69 and non-reserved (enhancement)
71 - parted now supports FBA DASD devices (enhancement)
73 - parted now supports the DIAG driver when running in a
74 virtual machine under z/VM (enhancement)
76 libparted: raise the limit on the maximum start sector and the
77 maximum number of sectors in a "loop" partition table from 2^32 to 2^64.
78 [bug introduced in parted-2.1]
80 libparted once again recognizes a whole-disk FAT partition
81 [bug introduced in parted-1.9.0]
83 libparted now recognizes scsi disks with a high major (128-135) as scsi
86 an msdos partition table on a very small device (smaller than one cylinder)
87 is now recognized. [bug introduced in parted-2.2]
89 libparted: zero-length devices (other than files) are ignored rather than
90 throwing an exception.
92 libparted: gpt label creation can no longer divide by zero with a
93 defective device or when a concurrent writer modifies the PE-size
94 bytes in the small interval between the write and subsequent read
95 of the primary GPT header.
97 ** Changes in behavior
99 "parted $dev print" now prints information about the device (model, size,
100 transport, sector size) even when it fails to recognize the disk label.
102 specifying partition start or end values using MiB, GiB, etc. suffixes
103 now makes parted do what I want, i.e., use that precise value, and not
104 some other that is up to 500KiB or 500MiB away from what I specified.
105 Before, to get that behavior, you would have had to use carefully chosen
106 values with units of bytes ("B") or sectors ("s") to obtain the same
107 result, and with sectors, your usage would not be portable between devices
108 with varying sector sizes. This change does not affect how parted handles
109 suffixes like KB, MB, GB, etc.
112 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.3 (2010-05-28) [stable]
116 parted now recognizes ATA over Ethernet (AoE) devices
118 parted now recognizes Linux Software RAID Arrays
120 libparted has a new partition flag to check for diagnostic (aka recovery
121 or reserved) partitions: PED_PARTITION_DIAG
125 When libparted deferenced a /dev/mapper/foo symlink, it would keep the
126 resulting /dev/dm-N name and sometimes use it later, even though it
127 had since become stale and invalid. It no longer stores the result
128 of dereferencing a /dev/mapper symlink.
130 libparted's msdos_partition_is_flag_available function now always reports
131 that the "hidden" flag is not available for an extended partition.
132 Similarly, msdos_partition_get_flag(p,PED_PARTITION_HIDDEN) always returns 0
133 for an extended partition.
135 libparted uses a more accurate heuristic to distinguish between
136 ext4 and ext3 partitions.
138 libparted now properly checks the return value of dm_task_run when
139 operating on devicemapper devices.
141 allow using ped_device_cache_remove(dev) followed by a (later)
142 ped_device_destroy() without corrupting the device cache.
144 when creating an ext2 file system[*], Parted no longer creates an
145 invalid one when its size is 2TiB or larger.
146 [*] Remember, now all FS-creation operations are deprecated in Parted.
147 This is not an indicator that we'll be supporting this code.
148 On the contrary, it is slated to be removed.
150 ** Changes in behavior
152 libparted no longer issues an exception/warning about >512-byte
153 sector support being "HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL". It seems to have matured
154 enough to be usable at least with GPT and MSDOS partition tables.
157 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.2 (2010-02-26) [stable]
159 ** Changes in behavior
161 The default alignment (--align option) for newly created partitions has
162 been changed to optimal.
166 The ped_device_get_*_alignment() functions now return a sane default
167 value instead of NULL when the so called topology information is incomplete.
168 The default minimum alignment aligns to physical sector size, the default
169 optimal alignment is 1MiB, which is what vista and windows 7 do.
173 Parted no longer uses a physical sector size of 0 or of any other
174 value smaller than the logical sector size.
176 dos: creating an HFS or HFS+ partition in an msdos partition table
177 used to set the partition type to 0x83. That is wrong. The required
178 number is 0xaf, and that is what is used now.
180 gpt: read-only operation could clobber MBR part of hybrid GPT+MBR table
181 [bug introduced in parted-2.1]
183 gpt: a read-only operation like "parted $dev print" would overwrite $dev's
184 protective MBR when exactly one of the primary and backup GPT tables was
186 [bug introduced prior to parted-1.8.0]
188 sun: the version, sanity and nparts VTOC fields were ignored by libparted.
189 Those fields are properly initialized now. The nparts (number of partitions)
190 field is initialized to 8 (max. number of sun partitions) rather that to a
191 real number of partitions. This solution is compatible with Linux kernel
194 "make install" no longer installs tests programs named disk and label
196 libparted: try harder to inform kernel of partition changes.
197 Previously when editing partitions, occasionally the kernel would
198 fail to be informed of partition changes. When this happened future
199 problems would occur because the kernel had incorrect information.
200 For example, if this problem arose when resizing or creating a
201 new partition, then an incorrect partition size might be displayed
202 or a user might encounter a failure to format or delete a newly
203 created partition, respectively.
205 libparted: committing a disk that was returned by ped_disk_duplicate
206 would always result in ped_disk_clobber being called (and thus the first
207 and last 9KiB of the disk being zeroed), even if the duplicated disk,
208 was not returned by ped_disk_fresh().
211 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.1 (2009-12-20) [stable]
215 new --align=<align> commandline option which can have the following values:
216 none: Use the minimum alignment allowed by the disk type
217 cylinder: Align partitions to cylinders (the default)
218 minimal: Use minimum alignment as given by the disk topology information
219 optimal: Use optimum alignment as given by the disk topology information
220 The minimal and optimal values will use layout information provided by the
221 disk to align the logical partition table addresses to actual physical
222 blocks on the disks. The mininal value uses the minimum aligment needed to
223 align the partition properly to physical blocks, which avoids performance
224 degradation. Where as the optimal value uses a multiple of the physical
225 block size in a way that guarantees optimal performance.
226 The min and opt values will only work when compiled with
227 libblkid >= 2.17 and running on a kernel >= 2.6.31, otherwise they will
228 behave as the none --align value.
230 libparted: new functions to set per disk (instead of per partition) flags:
233 ped_disk_is_flag_available()
234 ped_disk_flag_get_name()
235 ped_disk_flag_get_by_name()
238 libparted: new per disk flag: PED_DISK_CYLINDER_ALIGNMENT. This flag
239 (which defaults to true) controls if disk types for which cylinder alignment
240 is optional do cylinder alignment when a new partition gets added.
242 libparted: new functions to return per-partition-table-type limits:
243 - ped_disk_max_partition_start_sector: Return the largest representable
244 start sector number for a given "disk".
245 - ped_disk_max_partition_length: Return the maximum partition length
248 new command "align-check TYPE N" to determine whether the starting sector
249 of partition N is TYPE(minimal|optimal)-aligned for the disk. E.g.,
250 parted -s /dev/sda align-check min 1 && echo partition 1 is min-aligned
251 parted -s /dev/sda align-check opt 2 && echo partition 2 is opt-aligned
252 The same libblkid and kernel version requirements apply as for --align
254 Add functions to libparted to get minimal and optimal alignment
255 information from devices:
256 ped_device_get_minimal_aligned_constraint()
257 ped_device_get_optimal_aligned_constraint()
258 ped_device_get_minimum_alignment()
259 ped_device_get_optimum_alignment()
260 The same libblkid and kernel version requirements apply as for --align
262 Add ped_disk_get_partition_alignment() function to libparted to get
263 information about alignment enforced by the disk type.
267 parted can once again create partition tables on loop devices.
268 Before, "parted -s /dev/loop0 mklabel gpt" would fail.
269 [bug introduced in parted-1.9.0]
271 improved >512-byte sector support: for example, printing a table on a
272 4k-sector disk would show "Sector size (logical/physical): 4096B/512B",
273 when the sizes should have been "4096B/4096B".
275 gpt tables are more rigorously checked; before, partition entry array CRCs
276 were not checked, and we would mistakenly use the AlternateLBA member of a
277 known-corrupt primary table.
279 improved dasd disk support, in previous versions calling
280 ped_disk_new_fresh() or ped_disk_duplicate() on a dasd type PedDisk
281 would fail. This is fixed now.
283 handle device nodes created by lvm build with udev synchronisation enabled
286 when printing tables, parted no longer truncates flag names
289 * Noteworthy changes in release 2.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
293 Parted now supports disks with sector size larger than 512 bytes.
294 Before this release, Parted could operate only on disks with a sector
295 size of 512 bytes. However, disk manufacturers are already making disks
296 with an exposed hardware sector size of 4096 bytes. Prior versions of
297 Parted cannot even read a partition table on such a device, not to
298 mention create or manipulate existing partition tables.
299 Due to internal design and time constraints, the following
300 less-common partition table types are currently disabled:
301 amiga, bsd, aix, pc98
302 "bsd" and "amiga" are mostly done, but had a few minor problems,
303 so may remain disabled until someone requests that they be revived.
307 big-endian systems can once again read GPT partition tables
308 [bug introduced in parted-1.9.0]
310 ped_partition_is_busy no longer calls libparted's exception handler,
311 since doing so caused trouble with anaconda/pyparted when operating on
314 Partitions in a GPT table are no longer assigned the "microsoft
315 reserved partition" type. Before this change, each partition would
316 be listed with a type of "msftres" by default.
319 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.9.0 (2009-07-23) [stable]
323 parted now preserves the protective MBR (PMBR) in GPT type labels.
324 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2008-December/\
326 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-parted/2008-12/msg00015.html
328 gpt_read now uses SizeOfPartitionEntry instead of the size of
329 GuidPartitionEntry_t. This ensures that *all* of the partition
330 entries are correctly read.
331 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2008-December/\
333 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/attachments/\
334 20081202/b7c0528d/attachment.txt
336 mklabel (interactive mode) now correctly asks for confirmation, when
337 replacing an existent label, without outputting an error message.
338 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2009-January/\
341 resize now handles FAT16 file systems with a 64k cluster. This
342 configuration is not common, but it is possible.
343 http://parted.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/ticket/207
345 parted now ignores devices of the type /dev/md* when probing. These
346 types of devices should be handled by the device-mapper capabilities
348 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2009-April/\
351 The parted documentation now describes the differences in the options
352 passed to mkpart for the label types.
353 http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2009-April/\
356 ** Changes in behavior
358 include/parted/beos.h, include/parted/gnu.h and include/parted/linux.h
359 have been removed. The symbols contained in these files (GNUSpecific,
360 ped_device_new_from_store, BEOSSpecific, LinuxSpecific, LINUX_SPECIFIC)
361 were moved to the individual files that need them.
363 In libparted, the linux-swap "filesystem" types are now called
364 "linux-swap(v0)" and "linux-swap(v1)" rather than "linux-swap(old)"
365 and "linux-swap(new)" as in parted 1.8, or "linux-swap" as in older
366 versions; "old" and "new" generally make poor names, and v1 is the
367 only format supported by current Linux kernels. Aliases for all
368 previous names are available.
370 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.8.1 (2007-12-17) [stable]
372 ** FIXME: fill in details
374 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.8 (2007-08-09) [stable]
376 ** GNU parted is now licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3
377 or higher. See the COPYING file for more details.
380 - Add compute_block_counts() to improve ext2fs support.
381 - Properly detect 'ext2 fs too small' cases.
382 - Move formatting commands out of translatable strings.
383 - Read an msdos partition table from a device with 2K sectors.
384 - Remove always-false "Unable to open" diagnostic in ped_disk_new(),
385 leave the "unrecognized disk label" diagnostic.
386 - Don't leak partition table buffer in amiga_read().
387 - Don't read/write initialized memory with DEBUG turned on off for
388 'mklabel bsd' and 'mklabel amiga' command calls.
389 - Turn off DEBUG in libparted.c to avoid initializing all allocated
391 - Correct handling of HeaderSize field in GPT labels.
392 - Fix block number used when checking for ext2 fs state.
393 - Add detection support for Xen virtual block devices (/dev/xvd*).
394 - When reading DASD labels, check the filesystem type as well as
395 partition flags to determine what's on the partition.
396 - Add _dm_probe_all() from Debian to probe for all device-mapper
400 - Fixed exception handling in mkpart and mkpartfs commands.
401 - Add the --dry-run option to the partprobe command.
402 - Update docs: cannot specify 'primary' for a partition on a loop
404 - Remove unused functions (get_spaces).
405 - Fix off-by-one error in str_list_print_wrap().
406 - Use xmalloc() and xrealloc() to check return values.
407 - Fix invalid command line argument handling.
408 - Close memory leaks in parted.c and table.c.
409 - Fix warnings when compiling with translation support enabled.
410 - Use a consistent prompt when asking for a file system type.
411 - Update docs: don't reference old versions of gzip.
414 - Improve the testing framework in the tests/ subdirectory. Build out
415 more of the testing scripts so we can start using that to ensure we
416 don't introduce regressions in releases.
417 - Support testing with tmpfs filesystems on Linux.
418 - Work around inadequate libreadline in the configure script.
419 - Don't include config.h from internal headers.
421 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.7 (2007-05-09) [stable]
424 - Prevent compilation of DASD code on GNU Hurd systems.
425 - Integrate new unit testing framework for parted and libparted.
426 - Fix primary partition cylinder alignment error for DOS disk labels.
427 - Use PED_PARTITION_NORMAL in place of PED_PARTITION_PRIMARY.
428 - Avoid segfault due to a double free on reiserfs support.
431 - Fix script mode (-s) for mkfs command in parted.
432 - Suppress "you are not superuser..." warning in script mode.
433 - Fix off-by-one bug in parted when displaying information about the
435 - Do not translate partition names in the 'parted print' command.
436 This causes problems for non-Latin-based character sets.
437 - Send errors to stderr rather than stdout.
438 - Handle command line options independent of the order.
439 - Abort on any invalid option and handle -v and -h first.
440 - Only display the update /etc/fstab message when there has been a
441 change to the disk (a shorter and more direct message too).
443 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.6 (2007-03-20) [stable]
445 ** Revert the implementation of the linux-swap(new) and linux-swap(old) types.
446 The type is 'linux-swap' for v1, v2, and s1suspend swap partitions on Linux.
448 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.5 (2007-03-20) [stable]
450 ** Another minor update. Both versions 1.8.3 and 1.8.4 lacked po translation
451 files. These are included with version 1.8.5.
453 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.4 (2007-03-19) [stable]
455 ** Minor bug fix release for 1.8.3 to fix build issues on various
457 - Use 'uname -m' to determine if we build on System Z or not.
458 - Include <parted/vtoc.h> in <parted/fdasd.h> for format1_label_t
460 - Remove unused variables in libparted/arch/linux.c (-Werror).
461 - Check return values on fgets() and asprint() in libparted/arch/linux.c
463 - Check for tgetent() in libtinfo in the configure script.
464 - Move some macro definitions in <parted/disk.h> to fix a compile
465 problem with gcc-4.1.2 as indicated here:
466 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-parted/2007-03/msg00008.html
468 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.3 (2007-03-16) [stable]
471 - Header file clean ups.
472 - Sync the linux-swap header according to the Linux kernel sources.
473 - Enable support for swsusp partitions and the ability to differentiate
474 between old and new versions of linux-swap partitions.
475 - Renaming PARTITION_EXT to PARTITION_DOS_EXT in the DOS disklabel
476 code (consitency with Linux kernel source).
477 - Added libparted.pc pkg-config file.
478 - Remove unused functions, ifdefs, and other code.
479 - Deprecate ped_[register|unregister]_disk_type in favor of
480 ped_disk_type_[register|unregister].
481 - Small test program fixes (in label.c and common.c).
482 - Make functions const-correct.
483 - Handle systems where libreadline is not available.
484 - Preserve starting sector for primary NTFS 3.1 partitions on DOS
486 - Handle 2048-byte logical sectors in linux_read().
487 - Use PED_SECTOR_SIZE_DEFAULT macro in place of 512.
488 - Don't assume logical sector size is <= 512B on AIX.
489 - Detect HFS write failure.
490 - Use mkstemp() in place of mktemp().
491 - Added HFS+ resize support.
492 - Don't build DASD support on non-zSeries hardware.
495 - Use fputs() and putchar() in place for printf(), when possible.
496 - Detect/report stdout write errors.
497 - Accept the --version and --help options.
498 - Fix memory leaks in parted(8).
501 - Synchronize the manual page and --help documentation.
502 - GNU autoconf and automake updates.
503 - 'gcc -Wall -Wshadow' warning cleanups.
504 - Don't define _GNU_SOURCE manually.
505 - Documentation updates and cleanups (AUTHORS, copyright notices,
507 - Use gnulib (http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/).
509 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.2 (2007-01-12) [stable]
512 - Add the ped_device_cache_remove() function to remove a device from
513 the cache. This is necessary for some things that use libparted,
515 - Fix a segfault in ped_assert() where the wrong pointer is freed in
516 the backtrace handler.
517 - Only call _disk_warn_loss(disk) in do_mklabel() if disk is not NULL.
518 Fixes a segfault when initializing new volumes.
519 - Dynamically allocate space for exception messages.
520 - Output a backtrace when catching SEGV_MAPPER or a general SIGSEGV.
523 - Destroy all objects before return when called with --list or --all
525 - Zero sized device is shown as 0.00B and not -0.00kB.
526 - Implement 'print devices' command.
527 - Alias 'print list' to 'print all'.
528 - Alias 'mktable' to 'mklabel'.
531 - Other bug fixes, documentation updates, and translation improvements.
532 - Code and API clean-ups.
534 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.1 (2006-12-04) [stable]
537 - Rework backtrace support.
539 - Added --enable-selinux configure option to enable linking libparted with
540 libselinux and libsepol.
541 - Disable ext2fs resize for now, tell user to use resize2fs.
544 - Fix loop in print_all().
545 - Introduce the -list command-line switch.
546 - Make mktable aliased to mklabel.
547 - Warn before mklabel and mkfs.
548 - Code cleanups in _partition_warn_busy(), _disk_warn_busy(),
549 _partition_warn_loss(), and _disk_warn_loss().
550 - Avoid warning about user permissions when using --version.
551 - Fix 'print' command help.
552 - Proper print when there are no extended partitions, but partition names.
555 - Generate SHA-1 digest of the archive files and upload those along with the
556 actual archive files.
557 - Update translation files.
558 - Remove automatically generated files from version control.
560 * Noteworthy changes in release 1.8.0 (2006-11-17) [stable]
564 - Correctly handle disks with non-512 byte sector sizes
565 - Support LUN resizing (see new space, allow parted to use it)
566 - Prevent overlap of LastUsableLBA and PartitionEntryLBA in backup GPT
567 - Prevent SIGFPE when FAT sector size is 0
568 - Add ped_exception_get_handler()
569 - DASD support for IBM zSeries systems
570 - AIX disk label support
571 - Detect Promise SX8 storage devices
572 - Macintosh (ppc and x86) disk label improvements:
573 - Prevent LVM and RAID partition types from corrupting the table
574 - Fix removal of driver partition
575 - Add support binary units (MiB, KiB, GiB)
576 - In ped_register_disk_type(), handle disk_types==NULL case
577 - In ped_unregister_disk_type(), handle case where type is not registered
578 - Fix geometry read problems on 64-bit Macs (and probably other 64-bit systems)
579 - Add support for /dev/mapper devices via libdevmapper library
580 - Detect Apple_Boot partition types correctly on MacOS X 10.4 systems
583 - Various bug fixes, signal handling fixes, and spelling error fixes
584 - UI improvements to display more information about the disk and transport
587 ========================================================================
589 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
591 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
592 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
593 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
594 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
595 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
596 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.