On Thu, Feb 09, 2012 at 11:34:43PM +0800, Wanlong Gao wrote:
On 02/09/2012 10:12 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 08, 2012 at 01:32:47PM +0800, Wanlong Gao wrote:
>> Add the new api wipefs to erase the filesystem signatures
>> on a device but now erase any data.
>
> Having had a bit of time to think about this, I think this comment is
> right:
>
>> -guestfs_zero should use wipefs. See wipefs(8).
>
> wipefs is generally better (than "zero") in that it knows about
what's
> on the disk (via blkid) and only overwrites the minimum necessary to
> remove partition tables, RAID signatures etc. This is good.
>
> What's bad is that: (1) It probably doesn't work for formats that
> blkid doesn't understand. (2) It doesn't preserve sparseness,
> although arguably that doesn't matter because it's only overwriting
> stuff that should be non-zero already.
>
> Cf: libblkid/src/probe.c:blkid_do_wipe
> daemon/zero.c:do_zero
>
> On balance, I think that changing guestfs_zero to use wipefs is a
> better way to approach this, but I'm open to opinions on this ...
Yeah, I also considered about this, since wipefs can't erase the partition
table, but guestfs_zero does, so, I'm afraid that if I use wipefs(8) to
change the internal of guestfs_zero, the function also changed.
Right, I see.
It sounds like a new wipefs API is the way to go in that case.
However, it needs to be in an optional group. Just add [Optional "wipefs"]
to the flags field in generator/generator_actions.ml, and add a
function called optgroup_wipefs_available(), and everything else
should be generated automatically. See existing optgroup_*_available
functions for examples.
Rich.
--
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