[Parted-maintainers] Bug#239816: bug#16134: libparted Atari partition table support

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 10/15/2016 09:15 PM, Michael Schmitz wrote:
> good to see you managed to fix the libparted issues!

Thanks. I just happened to be in the situation that I'm writing a guide
how to set up a minimal Debian/m68k system on ARAnyM from scratch.

>> Ah, it works after enabling byte-swapping in ARAnyM :).
> 
> Did you write the table on the host and then had to byte swap to get it
> read in ARAnyM?

Correct. I created an empty image, mapped it to /dev/loop0 using losetup
and ran my patched version of parted to create an Atari partition table
plus two partitions for the system and swap.

In ARAnyM, I had to enable byte-swapping as otherwise the partitions
were not recognized.

> Just checked - Atari byte order disk image files of IDE disks don't need
> byte swapping. Host native byte order ones do, that suggests your
> partition table is in host native order. To get it to work in ARAnyM out
> of the box, and more importantly on real hardware the partition table
> would need to be written to the disk image with byte swapping.

Wouldn't ARAnyM or a real Atari write the data byte-swapped to the
disk anyway? I would expect that parted just uses the host order
which is why I had to byte-swap the disk image when using it in
ARAnyM. But I think we could add the byte-swapping later if
necessary.

> Note that SCSI disks don't need byte swapping so if you want to support
> both targets, libparted would need a byte swap option ...

Ok, good to know.

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz at debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz at physik.fu-berlin.de
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