Re: amiga partitioning support for parted

[Andrew Clausen]

Hi Sven,

Sorry for the delay... I had a conference all last week.

On Wed, Jul 16, 2003 at 01:50:14PM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> I am currently at Debconf 3 in Oslo, working at adding support for amiga
> partitioning scheme to libparted. I hope to have this finished before
> the end of Debcamp.

Cool!

> BTW, current 1.6.5 debian parted package does not build with gcc 3.3, i
> have a fixed patch which i will apply to the debian package, but i guess
> you already have fixed this in CVS or something such. If not, i would
> gladly send you this patch.

I suggest you grab 1.6.6-pre2.

> Ok, and now my questions :
> 
> The amiga partitioning can be set at any place in the first 16 (512) blocks.
> When creating a new part table, usuallyblock 0 is used, altough you
> could use block 2 or later, and have both a PC partition table and a
> amiga partition table on the same disk. Now, when i clobber the disk, I
> should just remove the first found amiga partition id, and not remove it
> on all 16 blocks ?

I think you should remove the ID from any block containing it.

After clobber() is called, no partition table should be detected
by any program.

> Also, is there a way to telling the higher levels
> that we are looking at a partition on block n, and not have to search
> for it each time ?

Do you mean ped_disk_get_partition_by_sector() ?
I don't really understand your question.

> If i understood right, alloc, free and duplicate only handle virtual
> partition tables on the disk, and read/write read/write them to the
> disk. Same goes for partition entries.

alloc/free/duplicate act on data structures.

ped_disk_commit_to_dev() is the only API entry-point that writes
to disk (for partition table stuff).

alloc creates a data structure representing an empty partition table.
free frees a PedDisk data structure.
duplicate clones a data structure representing a partition table.
(This is useful for implementing undo)

Cheers,
Andrew