Daniel J Blueman wrote: ... >>> What's (at worst) 128KB slack in partition layouts, when we already >>> skip the first 63 sectors anyway? >> >> If that were the only cost, we'd switch right away. >> However, parted's code is very fragile, and changing how it handles >> constraints/alignment seems like it'd be very risky. Why go there >> if it's not absolutely necessary? Besides, the functionality I think >> you want (to make the process convenient or mandatory) belongs in a >> higher-level tool. > > Yes, perhaps Matt Domsch's work is on the right lines, or no? > > http://www.mail-archive.com/parted-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org/msg02168.html
Two people replied to that message with questions and comments, but as far as I know, Matt has not answered. Besides, as you probably already realize, I think a low-level tool like parted must not enforce such alignment requirements. Sure, maybe an option to enable it, with a user-specified value, but even that has only marginal value, yet probably has high cost/risk. >> If the programmers and tools invoking parted cannot be bothered to >> do a little modulo arithmetic and be aware of alignment, then they >> shouldn't be choosing partition boundaries in the first place. > > Agreed; though it seems sensible to integrate as much of this into > libparted and ensure the applications use the constraints, rather than > duplicate the work in all the users of libparted: > > $ apt-cache rdepends libparted1.8-9 > [trimming list] > qtparted > kvpm > gnu-fdisk > fatresize > ubiquity > parted > gparted The difficulty is in finding a _safe_ way to do that without breaking API compatibility. Please give an example of what you might like to integrate. Adding new APIs is a lot easier than changing existing ones, so determining recommended alignment might make sense. However, adding an option to let parted use that alignment value (i.e., in a round-to-multiple-of-$N operation in the guts of the partition-creation code) might be tricky. _______________________________________________ parted-devel mailing list parted-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/parted-devel