simplediskimage 0.2

Library used to build simple disk images with multiple partitions

How to use

See examples/

Dependencies

Debian/Ubuntu

# Common
$ sudo apt install python3-parted python3-distutils
# FAT support
$ sudo apt install dosfstools mtools
# ext* support
$ sudo apt install e2fsprogs
# All
$ sudo apt install python3-parted python3-distutils dosfstools mtools e2fsprogs

Fedora/CentOS

# Common
$ sudo dnf install python3-pyparted
# FAT support
$ sudo dnf install dosfstools mtools
# ext* support
$ sudo dnf install e2fsprogs
# All
$ sudo dnf install python3-pyparted dosfstools mtools e2fsprogs

Known issues

mtools and debugfs is not good at error reporting, so if a copy fails it might not show until you try to mount the image.

Parted misbehaves on some platforms (Debian 10), and shrinks partitions. Use Sfdisk instead. Additionally, some FAT implementations expect the file system to have exactly the same size as the partition, and thus padding them will not work, unless done exactly.

copy_file_range seems to misbehave in containers sometimes, observed on Fedora 30 + podman with Debian 10 container where it skips to copy some data.

Future

• Configurable alignment, defaulting to 1MiB
• Optional cleaning ("always", "not on error", "never")
• Proper naive copy_file_range function, using dup()
• Integrated and automated tests
• GPT for sfdisk partitioner
• Multiboot images (iso, efi, bios)