KDE Partition Manager 2.2.0

KDE Partition Manager and KPMcore 2.2.0 are now released with a proper LUKS support! This is a fairly big feature release but it also got tested more than usual, so a lot of bugs were fixed (including some crashes). Unfortunately there is still one more reproducible crash (bug 363294) on exit when file open/save dialogs are used (and very similar crashes actually exist in some other KDE programs, e.g. kdebugdialog or Marble). If anybody has any idea how to fix it I would be grateful.

Changes in this release:

  • Much improved LUKS support. We used to just detect LUKS container.
    • Now KDE Partition Manager can create LUKS volumes and format inner file system. Since default options are used (except for the key size which was increased) we recommend cryptsetup 1.6 or later. At the moment we restrict the choice of new inner file systems to ext234, Btrfs, swap, ReiserFS, Reiser4, XFS, JFS, ZFS and LVM physical volumes  when formatting new encrypted partitions but if you create other file systems manually using command line tools they will still work in KDE Partition Manager (other than detection support for LVM PV, the support for LVM is not implemented but this might change soon as a result of GSoC project, there is already some LVM PV resize support in git master). If you think it makes sense to whitelist other file systems and there is a valid use case please leave a comment.
    • LUKS volumes can be opened/closed.
    • Resize support for filesystems encrypted with LUKS (obviously you can’t do this while LUKS volume is closed, you have to decrypt it first). To the best of my knowledge, no other partition manager can do this.
    • To prevent data loss, you can only move LUKS partitions that are closed. A few bugs were fixed in KDE Partition Manager to properly support unmovable but resizeable partitions (i.e. LUKS when it is closed).
    • Filesystems inside LUKS can be checked for errors, mounted, labels can be set, etc. All other stuff like free space reporting also works (and space taken up by LUKS metadata is taken into the account).
    • Opened LUKS partitions now cannot be removed, you have to close them first.
    • Copying LUKS partition works but only when they are closed.
  • More widespread use of C++11 features.
  • Fixed a couple of bugs present from KF5 porting. Also new Qt5 signal/slot syntax is used, so moc is used much less often
  • Clobbering (deleting file system signature) deleted partitions was fixed.
  • Some other bugs were fixed, e.g. NILFS2 resizing support was fixed.
  • ntfslabel from ntfs-3g is now used for setting NTFS labels.
  • A crash when partitions were deleted (mainly extended but not only) was fixed.
  • Compilation with Clang was fixed.

There is also a slightly older (e.g. now we use KPasswordDialog to unlock LUKS partitions) video demonstrating LUKS support.

Note for packagers: Calamares 2.2.2 will most likely work with KPMcore 2.2.0 after recompilation but Calamares 2.3 will be recommended as soon as it is released. Older versions of KDE Partition Manager are not compatible with KPMcore 2.2.0, so you need to update KPMcore and KDE Partition Manager at the same time. Qt 5.6.1 also fixes one minor NTFS bug in KPMcore but unfortunately it is not released yet.

Download links:

KPMcore 2.2.0

KDE Partition Manager 2.2.0

There are already packages for Arch and Gentoo, hopefully other distros will package it too.

LUKS support in KDE Partition Manager

KDE Partition Manager was able to detect encrypted LUKS partitions for some time. I’m glad to report that now support for LUKS volumes is much more complete. Unless I’m mistaken, KDE Partition Manager is the first GUI tool that supports creating and resizing LUKS partitions (provided that file system inside LUKS container supports resizing). This is still work in progress and we still need to implement some checks (e.g. it should not be possible to set labels when LUKS volume is closed). Here is a short video demonstrating current state:

 

KDE Partition Manager 2.0.3

I’m happy to announce new bugfix versions of KDE Partition Manager 2.0.1 and KPMcore 2.0.1.

  • Btrfs used space detection should work without crashing (it was actually cause by crash in btrfs-debug-tree program btrfs filesystem show is used).
  • Improved support for FAT12 partitions. They were not recognized before. For now they are reported as FAT16 (gparted behaves in the same way).
  • Installation path for libparted plugins is not force to be in system prefix anymore. This is consistent with how other KDE Applications work, but cmake might require KDE_INSTALL_USE_QT_SYS_PATHS to be set if you are installing kpmcore to /usr.
  • We know try to find KF5 version of kdesu in libexec even when kdesu is not in $PATH.
  • Fixed visible HTML in one dialog box (#354925).

There is still an open issue that Partition Manager reports itself as 2.0.0 instead of 2.0.1. I tried to bump the version but there seem to be some kind of bug that prevents KDE Partition Manager and Calamares to compile or work. We will continue to investigate this issue but 2.0.1 should work well despite incorrectly reporting it’s own version

Edit: KDE Partition Manager 2.0.3 is now released to fix a crash in settings dialog (it can be used with KPMcore 2.0.x but please use the latest KPMcore 2.0.1).

 

KDE Partition Manager 2.0.0

I’m happy to announce KDE Partition Manager 2.0.0 and the first stable release of KPMcore. This release mostly focused on splitting user interface and partitioning library which will be used in the next release of Calamares. It also brings some bugfixes but unfortunately I wasn’t able to go through all reported bugs in bugzilla yet (but they don’t seem to be regressions).

KDE Partition Manager 2.0 alpha

I am happy to announce that upcoming release of KDE Partition Manager is split into library (KPMcore) and GUI parts to allow other projects reuse partitioning code. KPMcore is already used by the development versions of distribution independent installer Calamares whose maintainer Teo Mrnjavac contributed a lot to help get this release of KDE Partition Manager out.

In the meantime you can download and test alpha versions of KPMcore and KDE Partition Manager.

KPMcore library is also licensed under GNU GPLv3+ (it links to parted which is GPLv3+).

Scrambling time from local perturbations of the eternal BTZ black hole

Paweł Caputa, Joan Simón, Andrius Štikonas, Tadashi Takayanagi, Kento Watanabe

We compute the mutual information between finite intervals in two non-compact 2d CFTs in the thermofield double formulation after one of them has been locally perturbed by a primary operator at some time tω in the large c limit. We determine the time scale, called the scrambling time, at which the mutual information vanishes and the original entanglement between the thermofield double gets destroyed by the perturbation. We provide a holographic description in terms of a free falling particle in the eternal BTZ black hole that exactly matches our CFT calculations. Our results hold for any time tω. In particular, when the latter is large, they reproduce the bulk shock-wave propagation along the BTZ horizon description.

Published in JHEP.

Some source code.