These two very simple patches add a pwrite-device API call. I have been conservative and not yet added the equivalent pread-device call, although that could be added in future. The motivation for this is in virt-resize: We need a way to zap the partition table cleanly[1], and obviously parted isn't working out for us[2]. Using this call we can zap MBR and GPT partition tables by overwriting them with zeroes (or zeroes + signature), and I have shown that this works at least for MBR. Although the semantics of pwrite and pwrite-device are not guaranteed full write, they almost certainly do this now and we could add this extra constraint in future. Rich. [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=633766 [2] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/parted-devel/2010-September/0037... -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones virt-df lists disk usage of guests without needing to install any software inside the virtual machine. Supports Linux and Windows. http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-df/