Re: Integrate fully partman-reiser4 into d-i

[Jose R R <Jose.r.r@metztli-it.com>]

I hacked (literally) a preliminary version of the of GNU Parted 3.2
source with Reiser4 support.

On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 8:23 AM, Edward Shishkin
<edward.shishkin@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 11/12/2015 12:28 PM, Jose R R wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 7:49 AM, Edward Shishkin
>> <edward.shishkin@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 09/21/2015 01:12 PM, Colin Watson wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Sun, Sep 20, 2015 at 07:40:37AM -0700, Jose R R wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> I have realized that although partman-reiser4 udeb enables Reiser4 to
>>>>> be listed as an option during the Debian-Installer routine of a
>>>>> netboot ISO image, the lack of support for reiser4 in GNU Parted
>>>>> (Debian's libparted) prevents installation from the GUI interface.
>>>>
>>>> It should be pretty easy to add that to parted, since nowadays the only
>>>> filesystem support it has is probing support.  I suggest preparing a
>>>> patch against git://git.sv.gnu.org/parted.git master that adds the
>>>> ability to detect existing reiser4 partitions and sending it upstream;
>>>> it should only be on the order of a hundred lines.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Does anybody care to prepare the patch?
>>
>> I am working on it Ed. I have been ironing out some wrinkles from the
>> last Reiser4 patch proposed several years ago in the GNU Parted
>> mailing lists. It's components and structure were basically cloned by
>> the initial btrfs patch submitted to Debian. autoreconf has been my
>> friend ;-)
>>
>>> I think we just need to a read a sector at REISER4_MAGIC_OFFSET
>>> and check the magic string ("ReIsEr4"), see definition of the struct
>>> reiser4_master_sb.
>>
>> Please enlighten me with reference to its documentation -- online or
>> in the Reiser4 source code?
>
>
> Alas, only source code..
>
> In reiser4 kernel sources look for REISER4_MAGIC_OFFSET
> and REISER4_SUPER_MAGIC_STRING.
>
> In reiser4progs it is called REISER4_MASTER_OFFSET and
> REISER4_MASTER_MAGIC respectively.
>

It can be built with the usual:

apt-get install libdevmapper-dev

./configure [ --prefix=/opt/parted-3.2/usr/local ]
make
make install

The resulting parted binary recognizes Reiser4 partitions when invoked
at your shell:
$ parted
GNU Parted 3.2
Using /dev/xda
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) print
And it will print recognized partitions -- including reiser4, of course.

Although it was developed and tested in a local machine,
I ran PoC build on small Google Compute Engine (GCE) Cloud instance
with a couple of existing Reiser4 partitions:

Snapshot:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CT8U78zUwAE-ZTc.png:large

Here is GNU Parted 3.2 bz2-compressed src modified for Reiser4 (in
case I no longer have time to improve it ;-)
Source: 2.6M reiser4-parted-3.2m.tar.bz2 @
http://metztli.it/readOnlyEphemeral/reiser4-parted-3.2m.tar.bz2
SHA256SUM:
http://metztli.it/readOnlyEphemeral/reiser4-parted-3.2m.tar.bz2.SHA256SUM


Best Professional Regards.

-- 
Jose R R
http://metztli.it
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