I drafted this blog post in 2016 (at least), but held off publishing it until I could have it fact checked. Well, 6 years have passed… I am 99% sure the information in this blog post is correct. But if you find an error with my explanation of the userspace-kernel-device dataflow then please send me an email so I can understand it better and update this post. Thank you!
I’ve been experimenting with creating functionality within bitmath for reading the size of storage devices. This would provide a function similar to Python’s os.path.getsize
, but for storage device capacity instead of file sizes.
Unfortunately, it turns out that there is no out of the box (and cross-platform) solution in Python for reading the capacity of system storage devices. This meant some research was going to be required. Luckily, possible solutions for how to do this are abundant across the internet. Well, for Linux anyway. Figuring out how to make this work on Mac OS X was more challenging.
And that’s where the story gets interesting.
In the rest of this blog post we’ll learn the basics of how programs can interact with storage devices via the ioctl()
system call. Then we’ll discuss the things we have to do and information we’ll need to have in order to implement an ioctl()
request in Python. Next we’ll see how to gather all the necessary information (request codes and expected result sizes). Finally we’ll put all of this together into a runnable Python program.
If you’re not familiar with that acronym, “ioctl” stands for “input/output control”.
bitmath is a Python module I wrote which simplifies many facets of interacting with file sizes in various units as python objects. A few weeks ago version 1.3.1 was released with a few small updates.
This new function accepts inputs using non-standard prefix units such as single-letter, or mis-capitalized units. For example, parse_string
will not accept a short unit like ‘100k‘, whereas parse_string_unsafe
will gladly accept it:
Several broken, moved, or redirecting links have been fixed. Wording and examples are more consistent. The documentation also lands correctly when installed via package.
bitmath-1.3.1 is available through several installation channels:
Ubuntu builds have not been prepared yet due to issues I’ve been having with Launchpad and new package versions.
bitmath is a Python module I wrote for working with file size units (ex: 12GiB
, 64kB
) as objects. You can use them just like you would use regular numbers in python. It’s full of other functionality as well. Objects have native ‘convert to $unit‘ methods, support native arithmetic, are sortable, and include a ‘best human readable prefix’ method.
Since March 2014, bitmath had only been available via PyPi and Fedora/EPEL repositories. Now, as of July 2nd 2016, bitmath is natively available to Ubuntu users by means of a new Personal Package Archive (PPA) hosting bitmath builds for Xenial, Wily, Vivid, Trusty, and Precise.
Ubuntu users can install bitmath in the following way:
Ubuntu support wouldn’t have happened if GitHub user hkraal hadn’t submitted an issue. Thanks Henk for getting the fire lit!
It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted any bitmath updates (bitmath is a Python module I wrote which simplifies many facets of interacting with file sizes in various units as python objects) . In fact, it seems that the last time I wrote about bitmath here was back in 2014 when 1.0.8 was released! So here is an update covering everything post 1.0.8 up to 1.3.0.
bitmath
, you can use to do simple conversions right in your shell [docs]!To help with the Fedora Python3 Porting project, bitmath now comes in two variants in Fedora/EPEL repositories (BZ1282560). The Fedora and EPEL updates are now in the repos. TIP: python2-bitmath
will obsolete the python-bitmath
package. Do a dnf
/yum
‘update
‘ operation just to make sure you catch it.
The PyPi release has already been pushed to stable.
Back in bitmath-1.0.8 we had 150 unit tests. The latest release has almost 200! Go testing! :confetti:
bitmath-1.0.8-1 was published on 2014-08-14.
Added Functionality
Tests