Friday, January 8, 2010

util-linux-ng 2.17

I released v2.17 this morning (CET). A few numbers about the release:
  • 404 patches
  • 488 files changed, 66816 insertions, 48504 deletions
  • 41 developers
  • 22 developers contributed first time
  • 5 months
Thanks to all contributors!

Release highlights

fallocate
  • this NEW COMMAND is a command line interface to fallocate Linux syscall and allows to preallocate blocks to a file.
unshare
  • this NEW COMMAND is a command line interface to unshare Linux syscall and allows to run program with some namespaces unshared from parent.
wipefs
  • this NEW COMMAND is based on libblkid and allows to remove filesystem or RAID signatures from a device.
libblkid
  • libblkid allows to gather information about block device topology, currently supported methods are:
    • ioctl - supported since kernel 2.6.32
    • sysfs - supported since kernel 2.6.31
    • fallback for DM, MD, LVM and EVMS on old kernels (base on code from xfsprogs/libdisk)

    The topology support is mostly designed for mkfs programs or partitioning tools (already used in mkfs.xfs, mkex2fs, libparted and fdisk)
  • libblkid supports partition tables parsing (currently supported are aix, bsd, dos, mac, gpt, minix, sgi, solaris, sun and unixware). This functionality is designed for mkfs programs, DeviceKits, [k]partx or so.
  • libblkid API documentation is available at http://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux-ng/libblkid-docs/
blockdev
  • supports all new topology ioctls
fdisk
  • aligns newly created partitions to minimum_io_size boundary ("minimum_io_size" is physical sector size or stripe chunk size on RAIDs).
  • supports disks with alignment_offset now.

Complete ReleaseNotes:

ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux-ng/v2.17/v2.17-ReleaseNotes

Tarball:
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux-ng/v2.17/util-linux-ng-2.17.tar.bz2