Phillip Susi wrote: > On 3/11/2011 4:04 PM, Jim Meyering wrote: >> Thanks for the patch. >> >> This sounds like a good change. >> However, can you give a little more detail? >> Does parted's current behavior induce failure in some other tool? >> What's the motivation? >> >> And especially, can you write a test for it, or at least >> outline a quick procedure for demonstrating how this changes >> parted's behavior (in which case I'll write it)? > > It seems that the behavior was copied from dmraid, which decided a while > back to start adding the 'p' always. Debian and Ubuntu have been > carrying a patch to reverse that change to both dmraid and parted. > Initially I got that patch dropped in Ubuntu during the Natty > development cycle because we want to avoid diverging from upstream, and > if the base device name ends in a digit, then you NEED the 'p' or > various tools get confused about what is the disk name and what is the > partition name. > > This then lead me to gparted causing a problem. It had code to handle > dmraid devices specially from before libparted could, and it was > invoking dmraid to create the partition devices, and explicitly telling > it not to add the 'p'. This meant that a duplicate partition device was > created, without the 'p' in the name ( /dev/mapper/RAID1 and > /dev/mapper/RAIDp1 ). Having two devices for the same partition is very > bad. You can end up doing things like delete the partition while it is > mounted and reuse its space in another partition, because the checks to > see if the partition are mounted do not know about the duplicate device. > > After speaking with the gparted maintainer, he has provided a configure > switch to disable the gparted dmraid handling code and leave it up to > libparted, which solves the duplicate device problem. During that > discussion I also learned that the kpartx tool which some distributions > use to create the partition devices instead of dmraid only adds the 'p' > if the previous character is a digit. Further discussion on mailing > lists indicated that this is the correct behavior that Linux has used > "since the dawn of time".
Can you give a reference to that discussion? _______________________________________________ parted-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/parted-devel
