[udisks] Extended Partitions

[David Zeuthen]

Hi,

On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 6:39 AM, Georg Grabler <ggrabler at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear UDisks Developers / Community.
> To introduce me and us, I'm on the Chakra-Project team, mainly working on
> the system installer Tribe. We are about to rewrite our whole partitioning
> to UDisks (using the DBus interface), and are currently in the stage after
> the dbus function implementation starting writing the user interface.

You should probably be targeting udisks2 which is now on the master
branch. It is expected to be done in a couple of months (targeting
Fedora 17). I just uploaded a snapshot of the latest docs here

http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/udisks2-20110929/

> We're doing pretty well with that, but we're stuck with a problem now:
> Extended partitions.
>
> The most serious problem we encounter is that after an EPT, the "next"
> partition after the EPT usually has an offset which is the end of the
> extended partition size to the next sector - as I understand the
> specification. Having this in UDisks, we currently show "unallocated" space,
> since there is an offset, and everything we don't know is "unallocated" to
> us. Is there any way to check wether this unallocated space is "usable" or
> "unusable" as in this case?

I'm not entirely sure what this means.

> The other thing isn't really critical as I see it, it's about the
> PartitionType. We can check the value for 0x05 of 0x0F in the PartitionType
> property to know if it's an EPT, though, I think there should be an easier
> way than that to know if something is an "extended" partition or not (maybe
> IdUsage, if it returns PartitionTable for EPT, just realized I didn't check
> that before).

We could add a properties PartEntryContainer (TRUE iff it's an
extended partition) and PartEntryContainee (/ or objpath of the
extended partition the partititon is part of).

Thanks,
David