Re: [Libguestfs] Should we always do wipefs before mkfs? Discuss ...
On Mon, Feb 04, 2013 at 06:23:38PM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
All mkfs.<type> should be robust enough to wipe the device. I'm
currently working with guys around filesystems to improve mkfs.ext4
and mkfs.xfs
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=902512
.. but nothing is perfect so explicitly call wipefs(8) from
installers or things like libguestfs is definitely good idea.
We could change libguestfs's guestfs_mkfs (internally) so it
always
does an implicit wipefs on the filesystem. wipefs is not too onerous --
in particular I believe it only writes to a few chosen areas of the
disk. Especially considering that we're about to run mkfs anyway
which for some filesystems writes a lot of blocks.
wipefs(8) (or blkid_do_wipe() from the library) wipes only magic
strings to make the filesystem (raids or partition tables) invisible
for libblkid. It means very few bytes.
Thoughts?
Go ahead :-)
Karel
--
Karel Zak <kzak(a)redhat.com>
http://karelzak.blogspot.com