[Parted-maintainers] Bug#602568: squeeze-di-beta1 installer: partman hang

[Jean-Christian de Rivaz]

It seem that the only maintained source archive for GNU parted is 
git://git.debian.org/git/parted/parted.git . Right ?

I managed to find that the bug was introduced by this commit:

commit c79d91ec71882a1673daae0482aa90c514c63cc1
Author: Jim Meyering <meyering at redhat.com>
Date:   Tue Mar 30 16:50:59 2010 +0200

     dos: accommodate very small devices (useful for testing)

     * libparted/labels/dos.c (_primary_constraint): Don't pass a negative
     "device_length" to ped_geometry_init when the underlying device
     has fewer sectors than a "cylinder".

diff --git a/libparted/labels/dos.c b/libparted/labels/dos.c
index 752f186..8679c49 100644
--- a/libparted/labels/dos.c
+++ b/libparted/labels/dos.c
@@ -1616,8 +1616,13 @@ _primary_constraint (const PedDisk* disk, const 
PedCHSGeometry* bios_geom,
                                         dev->length - min_geom->end))
                         return NULL;
         } else {
-               if (!ped_geometry_init (&start_geom, dev, cylinder_size,
-                                       dev->length - cylinder_size))
+               /* Do not assume that length is larger than 1 cylinder's
+                  worth of sectors.  This is useful when testing with
+                  a memory-mapped "disk" (a la scsi_debug) that is say,
+                  2048 sectors long.  */
+               if (cylinder_size < dev->length
+                   && !ped_geometry_init (&start_geom, dev, cylinder_size,
+                                          dev->length - cylinder_size))
                         return NULL;
                 if (!ped_geometry_init (&end_geom, dev, 0, dev->length))
                         return NULL;


I posted a message on the bug-parted at gnu.org, but it seem that there is 
not a lot of developers on it, so I don't expect this will be handled 
anytime soon.

The only basic idea I have right now, is to add a "-t" option to force 
to not call ped_geometry_init (&start_geom, ...) if cylinder_size < 
dev->length when using parted with a memory-mapped device for testing 
purpose. There is maybe a better logic to handle all of that, but I 
don't know this code good enough to see it. Where can I find a test case 
with a memory-mapped device that needed this commit ?

Jean-Christian de Rivaz