GNU Parted - News: parted-2.4 released [stable]

parted-2.4 released [stable]

Item posted by Jim Meyering <meyering> on Wed 18 May 2011 05:02:37 PM UTC.

This is to announce parted-2.4, a stable bug-fix release.
See the NEWS below for a summary of noteworthy changes.

Here is Parted's home page:

    http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/

For a summary of all changes and contributors, see:
  http://git.debian.org/?p=parted/parted.git;a=shortlog;h=v2.4
or run this command from a git-cloned parted directory:
  git shortlog v2.3..v2.4

To summarize the 1340(!) gnulib-related changes, run these commands
from a git-cloned parted directory:
  git checkout v2.4
  git submodule summary v2.3

Here are the compressed sources:
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parted/parted-2.4.tar.gz   (3.1MB)
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parted/parted-2.4.tar.xz   (1.5MB)

Here are the GPG detached signatures[*]:
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parted/parted-2.4.tar.gz.sig
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parted/parted-2.4.tar.xz.sig

To reduce load on the main server, use a mirror listed at:
  http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

[*] You can use either of the above signature files to verify that
the corresponding file (without the .sig suffix) is intact.  First,
be sure to download both the .sig file and the corresponding tarball.
Then, run a command like this:

  gpg --verify parted-2.4.tar.gz.sig

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
then run this command to import it:

  gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 000BEEEE

and rerun the `gpg --verify' command.

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Autoconf 2.68.68-2105
  Automake 1.11a
  Gettext 0.18.1
  Gnulib v0.0-5295-g2c25c9e
  Gperf 3.0.4

NEWS

* Noteworthy changes in release 2.4 (2011-05-18) [stable]

** Bug fixes

  parted no longer allows the modification of certain in-use partitions.
  In particular, before this fix, parted would permit removal or modification
  of any in-use partition on a dmraid and any in-use partition beyond the 15th
  on a regular scsi disk.

  Improve support of DASD devices on the s390 architecture.
  Parted now supports all DASD types (CKD and FBA), DASD formats (CDL,
  LDL, CMS non-reserved, and CMS reserved), and DASD drivers (ECKD, FBA,
  and DIAG) in all combinations supported by the Linux kernel.  As before,
  only CDL format on CKD DASD using the ECKD driver is supported for
  read-write operations (create, delete, move, re-size, etc.).  However,
  the implicit partition present on LDL- and CMS-formatted disks is now
  correctly recognized for read-only operations.  In detail:

  - parted now correctly handles LDL-format disks with a block
    size other than 4096 (bug fix)

  - parted now recognizes the CMS disk format, both reserved
    and non-reserved (enhancement)

  - parted now supports FBA DASD devices (enhancement)

  - parted now supports the DIAG driver when running in a
    virtual machine under z/VM (enhancement)

  libparted: raise the limit on the maximum start sector and the
  maximum number of sectors in a "loop" partition table from 2^32 to 2^64.
  [bug introduced in parted-2.1]

  libparted once again recognizes a whole-disk FAT partition
  [bug introduced in parted-1.9.0]

  libparted now recognizes scsi disks with a high major (128-135) as scsi
  disks

  an msdos partition table on a very small device (smaller than one cylinder)
  is now recognized.  [bug introduced in parted-2.2]

  libparted: zero-length devices (other than files) are ignored rather than
  throwing an exception.

  libparted: gpt label creation can no longer divide by zero with a
  defective device or when a concurrent writer modifies the PE-size
  bytes in the small interval between the write and subsequent read
  of the primary GPT header.

** Changes in behavior

  "parted $dev print" now prints information about the device (model, size,
  transport, sector size) even when it fails to recognize the disk label.

  specifying partition start or end values using MiB, GiB, etc. suffixes
  now makes parted do what I want, i.e., use that precise value, and not
  some other that is up to 500KiB or 500MiB away from what I specified.
  Before, to get that behavior, you would have had to use carefully chosen
  values with units of bytes ("B") or sectors ("s") to obtain the same
  result, and with sectors, your usage would not be portable between devices
  with varying sector sizes.  This change does not affect how parted handles
  suffixes like KB, MB, GB, etc.