On Tue, Feb 05, 2013 at 10:20:03AM +0100, Karel Zak wrote: > On Mon, Feb 04, 2013 at 06:23:38PM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: > > > > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=907554 > > All mkfs.<type> should be robust enough to wipe the device. I'm > currently working with guys around filesystems to improve mkfs.ext4 > and mkfs.xfs > > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=902512 > > .. but nothing is perfect so explicitly call wipefs(8) from > installers or things like libguestfs is definitely good idea. > > > We could change libguestfs's guestfs_mkfs (internally) so it always > > does an implicit wipefs on the filesystem. wipefs is not too onerous -- > > in particular I believe it only writes to a few chosen areas of the > > disk. Especially considering that we're about to run mkfs anyway > > which for some filesystems writes a lot of blocks. > > wipefs(8) (or blkid_do_wipe() from the library) wipes only magic > strings to make the filesystem (raids or partition tables) invisible > for libblkid. It means very few bytes. > > > Thoughts? > > Go ahead :-) Thanks . That was my conclusion when I looked at the wipefs code in blkid last night: it's worth trying it, but we won't fail the whole operation if for some reason the wipefs fails. Here is my patch: https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/commit/72dd398679cd0bb803daf306d12558369615ba70 Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Fedora Windows cross-compiler. Compile Windows programs, test, and build Windows installers. Over 100 libraries supported. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe util-linux" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
