On Thu, Jun 14, 2007 at 03:50:28PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: > Jim Meyering wrote: > [...] > > Thanks for looking into this. > > >In addition, there is the fact that Parted's partition-table (aka > >what it calls "label") support is currently tied to a 512-byte sector > >size for many label types. BTW, do any of you know which are the > >partition types that matter the most to us? MSDOS and GPT seem like > >the top priority ones, and I've fixed most parts of those two, but > >have only lightly tested the GPT changes. Also, with >512-byte sector > >devices becoming more and more common (e.g., ipods, CDs, new-and-bigger > >disks), I wonder how important it is to make Parted work for them, now. > >Fixing Parted for the few most common partition types isn't a big deal, > >but fixing all of them would require more time and testing resources than > >I expect to have. I plan to leave most of the others in their current, > >works-only-for-512-byte-sectors state. > > From the virt-manager/libvirt p.o.v. it seems to me the important > operations are: > > (1) Find attached drives. > > (2) Find partitions available & their sizes. > > (3) Allocate logical volumes. > > (4) Find out how much free space is available on a partition, and carve > out a file. > > Correct me if I'm wrong (I usually am), but: > > Nothing can do (1) except doing a brute force scan over /dev and looking > for likely block devices (this is what vgscan does). HAL can do this for physical devices. > Parted can do (2), with several limitations including sector size. It > can't do (3) at all, but then neither can anything else except forking > the LVM command line tools. > > And (4) can be done by libvirtd using ordinary POSIX calls, so no > external library support is needed, just some work to remote those > operations (which is mostly done). Regards, Dan. -- |=- Red Hat, Engineering, Emerging Technologies, Boston. +1 978 392 2496 -=| |=- Perl modules: http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ -=| |=- Projects: http://freshmeat.net/~danielpb/ -=| |=- GnuPG: 7D3B9505 F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 -=|