registry team mailing list archive

[Phillip Susi <psusi@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 05/31/2010 02:00 PM, Curtis Gedak wrote:
> Phillip, do you recall when dmraid support was added to libparted?

Sometime between 1.8 and 2.2.

> Unfortunately I do not think that dmraid can simply be removed at
> this point in time.  Following are the reasons that I believe
> DMRaid.cc is needed for at least a while longer (perhaps a year or
> more):

Then perhaps it could be disabled by the configure script when it
detects that you have (lib)parted 2.2?

> A)  If libparted device detection is used, it takes an inordinate
> amount of time to scan devices on computer systems that do not have a
> physical floppy drive installed, but do have the BIOS set to indicate
> a floppy drive is present. This problem was tracked in GParted bug
> #351753. Missing floppy causes loop on scanning devices.
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=351753

How long are we talking here?  I would expect a few seconds to be spent 
trying to access the floppy before giving up, and the proper fix to that 
is not to misconfigure the bios so that it thinks it has a floppy. 
Looking at the parted bug, it seems like a NOTABUG to me.  If your 
system has a broken floppy, then it has a broken floppy; it really isn't 
(lib)parted's job to guess that it isn't really supposed to be there at 
all and hide it.  If the kernel says the device exists, then 
lib/g/parted should list it.

Now if it is getting stuck for more than 15 seconds or so then that 
sounds like a software bug doing too many retries before giving up.

> Based on this I can see that significant changes in behaviour have
> occurred with dmraid devices and parted from the Ubuntu 10.04 CD.  Not
> only were new device entries created that match the rule of thumb for
> naming partitions, but the previous partition names as normally created
> by dmraid, were missing.  Since kpartx was used, I can only assume that
> parted or some other subsystem is responsible for the change in
> partition names.
>
> I'll bet that these discrepancies in behaviour are causing some
> confusion for people using dmraid devices and parted/gparted.

Yes, there was a serious regression in lucid for dmraid devices that you 
have noticed.  See lp #568050, which is unfortunately full of useless 
vitriol.  As I said before, upstream has moved to adding the p but 
Ubuntu has had a patch for a while to revert to the old behavior of not 
adding the p in dmraid.  The new code that came with parted 2.2 does 
insert the p, which is why it shows up when you run parted but not when 
dmraid creates the device.

-- 
Gparted does not list dmraid devices
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/554582
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Registry
Administrators, which is the registrant for GParted.