GPT name overflow

[Andreas Dilger]

Hello,
I was just testing GPT partitioning with parted-1.6.0-pre2 and I noticed
a couple of minor issues:

1) Entering a long name (over the 36 unicode character limit, I think)
   made it abort with "Error during translation: Invalid or incomplete
   multibyte or wide character".  I tried it with an 80-char input of
   "aaa...aaa" and it worked OK (result truncated to 36 chars), but the
   string "this is a long name which hopes to be too long" causes it
   to abort on repeated tests.

2) (this may be a parted usability bug and not GPT specific) if I try to
   new partition and I specify a starting location which is the same as
   the end of the previous partition it complains that the partitions
   are overlapping instead of adding a small fudge factor.  If I manually
   add .001 to the starting location it works, and often "print" will
   report the starting location as being the same as the end of the
   previous partition, e.g.

   (parted) p 
   Disk geometry for /tmp/gpt: 0.000-10240.000 megabytes
   Disk label type: gpt
   Minor    Start       End     Filesystem  Name                  Flags
   1          0.017    100.000              test_label            
   (parted) mkpart p 100 200
   Error: The new partition overlaps with another partition.
   (parted) mkpart p 100.001 200
   (parted) p
   Disk geometry for /tmp/gpt: 0.000-10240.000 megabytes
   Disk label type: gpt
   Minor    Start       End     Filesystem  Name                  Flags
   1          0.017    100.000              test_label            
   2        100.000    200.000

3) Since GPT only supports primary partitions (and probably other label
   types also), it would be nice to avoid having it ask what partition
   type when working in interactive mode.  This is probably true of any
   input which only has a single choice.  I can see that you might need
   to keep it for single command-line inputs to make the parsing sane.

4) GPT doesn't seem to keep the "type" of a partition, or parted doesn't
   print it out with 'p' correctly.  It is my understanding that GPT has
   GUIDs instead of single-byte partition types, so parted should probably
   print these as flags, but it does not (unlike msdos partitions):

   (parted) set 1 boot on
   (parted) set 2 raid on
   (parted) set 3 lvm on
   (parted) p
   Disk geometry for /tmp/gpt: 0.000-10240.000 megabytes
   Disk label type: gpt
   Minor    Start       End     Filesystem  Name                  Flags
   1          0.017    100.000              test_label            
   2        100.000    200.000                                    
   3        200.000    300.000                                    


4) (feature) It is not possible to tell parted a specific disk geometry to
   use.  You either need to reboot with specific kernel options, and it is
   not possible to test with regular files and a simulated geometry.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/