Re: parted 2.1 crash with 'Apple Boot' partition

[Chris Murphy]

Summary: Parted crashes when listing contents of a GPT disk containing an 
"Apple Boot" partition. Previously it was thought this was due to presence of 
Apple's new encrypted logical volume scheme. The crash so far only occurs with 
a particular Apple Boot partition located here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3253801/AppleBoot-sparse.img.tar.xz

Upon regression, which creates a new Apple Boot partition and contents from 
scratch, the problem can not be reproduced.

Conclusion: At some point the Apple Boot partition became corrupt or modified 
in a way that induces parted 2.1 to crash, despite Apple's fsck_hfs indicating 
the filesystem is clean. 

Whatever the nature of the deviant partition is that induces the crashing, I 
think it's likely to be rare enough to warrant no further attention.




------------
Regressions, detail:

1. Clean 10.7.0 install, crash does not occur.

a. Zero'd the first 80GB of the target disk.
b. Installed 10.7.0, which produces three partitions: EFI fat32, Mac OS hfsx, 
Apple Boot hfs+.
c. Attempted to install CentOS 6.2. It proceeded past the prior crash point in 
the GUI. And at command line, parted -l works as expected.


2. After updating 10.7.0 to 10.7.3 using Apple's Combo updater, crash still 
does not occur.

3. After update 10.7.3 with 'Apple Recovery Update 1.0', crash still does not 
occur.
3b. After reapplying Combo updater 10.7.3, crash still does not occur. (Did 
this again for proper continuity because the Recovery Update predates the 
10.7.3 update.)
3c. Booted multiple times off both the Mac OS and Recovery (Apple Boot) 
partitions, and retested, crash still does not occur.

4. Enabled FileVault2 feature*, crash still does not occur.



* FileVault2 is Apple's new full disk encryption. It works post installation of 
the operating system, by placing the jhfs+/jhfsx volume into a new Core Storage 
based volume group as an encrypted logical volume. It then also makes some 
modifications to the Apple Boot partition, which then becomes the new boot 
partition since the previous boot files are now all encrypted and can't be used.