RE: Bugs in parted's pte handling?

[Robert Herndon]

Jim:

  Thank you for the quick reply.

The partitions are created by a Quantum product.
I'm not sure why it creates EFI labels with 9
partitions, but suspect that it involves compatibility
with early versions of Solaris's EFI label code.

I don't have a tool I could send that generates
such labels; even the tool I do have would not
be very convenient for you, as it contains a
large amount of (for your purposes) irrelevant
crud, an awkward user interface, and writes only
a fixed-format label.

  I can send you some 'dd's of such labels (both
primary and backup if you like) and a script to
write them out to a device, for any disk device
size(s) you'd like (but would need to know that/
those size(s) in advance).  Alas, I probably can't
send them until Monday afternoon or so.

Robert
----
Robert Herndon | Software Developer | Quantum Corporation | Office: 651.688.4330 | address@hidden

Preserving the World's Most Important Data. Yours.



-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Meyering [mailto:address@hidden]
Sent: Sat 10/23/2010 4:09 AM
To: Robert Herndon
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: Bugs in parted's pte handling?

Robert Herndon wrote:
> [Apologies for any protocol violations here.  I've just
> joined the group, and don't see this addressed in the
> recently archived mailing list issues.]
>
> There seem to be bugs in the handling of partition table
> entries in parted, relating to cases where
>
> gpt->NumberOfPartitionEntries * gpt->SizeOfPartitionEntry
>
> is not a multiple of the sector size.  This is true of all
> parted versions I've looked at (1.8.1, 1.8.8, and 2.3),
> although the particulars vary somewhat between versions.

Thank you for a fine bug report.
How do the offending GPT partition tables arise?  Do you know of a tool
that produces them?  By default?  I would imagine that such tables are
rather rare.

Of course, that's no reason to read uninitialized memory and fail for
a technically-valid GPT partition table.

I'll fix it one way or another, but will need a test case.  Do you
have code handy to generate an offending table?  Ideally it would use
only parted and say, dd, awk and similarly portable tools.  A C program
would work, too, but I'd probably have to get a copyright assignment or
disclaimer from you in order to be able to use it.

At worst, I will cook up something starting with a parted-created image,
and poking into it a few new values and manually-computed checksums
to match.

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