Hi! Is this the right mailing list for Palimpsest-related email? I couldn't find any others, sorry if it's not!
I got a new hard drive recently and I've been using it as a chance to check out the capabilities of Palimpsest/udisks. Overall my experience has been very positive. This is the first partitioning program that I actually *like* to use. Even though I realize that the stack is still in flux, I hope you can benefit from some feedback at this stage. 1. The slider in the "create partition" view has to go! This is a 1.5TB disk, so the smallest partition I can create on an empty disk is 21 GB! And it takes a lot of precision to get it down to this size. :) This clearly fails when the user wants to create a small /boot or swap partition. 2. Aligning partitions to cylinder/head size is so 1990. When I create a GUID partition table, it should be a clear indication that I don't care about being compatible with historic versions of MS-DOS. There are good reasons to align to 4kbyte boundaries, as recent Western Digital hard drives have 4kbyte physical sectors while still emulating 512-byte sectors for the operating system. Unfortunately most partitioning tools today start the first partition at the 63rd sector which would be unaligned. If file system blocks do not align up with physical sector size, then the disk has to do expensive read-modify-write operations. This may also apply to SSD disks, where eraseblocks can be a whopping 512 kbytes large. But I don't know what sort of penalty they actually incur. I hear that recent Windows versions always align the first partition to 1 MiB (2048 sectors). This might be a convention worth adhering to? Currently the only way to create properly aligned partitions on Linux is to use command-line Parted and calculate sector numbers by hand! 3. Partitioning tools like Parted lock the whole disk while they are running. If I try to delete a partition in Palimpsest, while Parted is running, it actually deletes the partition on disk physically, but then fails when telling the kernel to re-read the partition table. The result is that udisks thinks the partition still exists (delete failed), but any operations on the partition will fail even after quitting Parted. 4. When adding physical volumes to a LVM2 volume group in Palimpsest, I think it should also list allocated-but-empty partitions. I may want to partition the whole drive up front and create the volume group later. 5. When I initialize a PV with "pvcreate /dev/sda9", it successfully appears in Palimpsest as #orphan_lvm2 However, when I allocate it as a new VG with "vgcreate test /dev/sda9", the "test" VG does not appear. I guess this is just missing functionality? Regards, Marti _______________________________________________ devkit-devel mailing list devkit-devel@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/devkit-devel
