[parted-devel] Partition move function

[Phillip Susi]

On 4/29/2010 4:22 PM, Curtis Gedak wrote:
> For all other file systems, GParted has implemented a block by block
> copy operation.  Please note that I believe early releases of GParted
> used 'dd' only for copying partitions, not _moving_ partitions.

Does it currently use large ( 4-8 MB maybe ) buffers with O_DIRECT?
That is much faster than transferring 4kb at a time through the kernel
buffer cache.

> The GParted move code does not contain intelligence regarding the file
> system.  While performing a move GParted copies each and every block in
> the partition regardless of whether the block contains data.

Would you be interested in improving this to skip the unused blocks?
Asking e2fslibs for the allocation bitmap is pretty straight forward.

> GParted first performs a read of the entire partition, prior to moving
> the partition in an attempt to avoid moving a partition containing bad
> blocks.

Outch, so it reads the entire thing twice?  Why?  Why not just warn the
user that there were some bad sectors detected and fill the destination
with zeroes?

Jim, it seems to me that this ought to go in libparted so both tools can
deliver the same functionality.  I know I would found it useful to be
able to move a partition from the command line on a remote server.  It
sounded like you disagree?