[Parted-maintainers] Bug#863980: parted: improperly claims bad alignment

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

Package: parted
Version: 3.2-17
Severity: normal

partition alignment on a sector that is a multiple of 4MiB is aligned
with any storage medium i know of.

however, parted complains that it is not well-aligned:

------------------

0 root at alice:~# parted /dev/sdb 
GNU Parted 3.2
Using /dev/sdb
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) print                                                            
Model: ST330062 0AS (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 300GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start  End  Size  Type  File system  Flags

(parted) mklabel msdos
Warning: The existing disk label on /dev/sdb will be destroyed and all data on
this disk will be lost. Do you want to continue?
Yes/No? yes                                                               
(parted) mkpart                                                           
Partition type?  primary/extended? primary                                
File system type?  [ext2]?                                                
Start? 4MiB                                                               
End? -1                                                                   
Warning: The resulting partition is not properly aligned for best performance.
Ignore/Cancel? ignore                                                     
(parted)

------------------


this looks like a bug in parted to me -- how else is it supposed to be aligned?

     --dkg



-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.0
  APT prefers testing-debug
  APT policy: (500, 'testing-debug'), (500, 'testing'), (200, 'unstable-debug'), (200, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental-debug'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64
 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages parted depends on:
ii  libc6         2.24-10
ii  libparted2    3.2-17
ii  libreadline7  7.0-3
ii  libtinfo5     6.0+20161126-1

parted recommends no packages.

Versions of packages parted suggests:
pn  parted-doc  <none>

-- no debconf information