This is part of a series of posts on the design and technical steps of creating Himblick, a digital signage box based on the Raspberry Pi 4.
We would like to have an easy to mount the media partition in the SD cards, so that one can change the signage content by simply plugging the card into any computer: see the "kindergarden entrance" use case.
Raspbian Lite comes with a boot partition and a small rootfs partition. The latter would usually get extended by raspi-config to fill all available SD space.
What we need instead is to enlarge the rootfs partition enough to fit the Himblick system partition (say, 4GB), and allocate the rest of the SD card as a media partition.
Since the resulting media partition could be pretty big, needs to be mounted in as many systems as possible, and could potentially be used to store very big video files, the recently liberated exFAT filesystem seems to be the filesystem of choice.
pyparted makes it possible to update a partition table from Python. There is little documentation on it, but it follows closely the API of the underlying libparted
Checking the existing SD partition situation
To keep operations solid and idempotent, we start with a check on the existing partition table:
def partition(self, dev: Dict[str, Any]):
"""
Update partitioning on the SD card
"""
try:
import parted
except ModuleNotFoundError:
raise Fail("please install python3-parted")
# See https://github.com/dcantrell/pyparted/tree/master/examples
# for pyparted examples
# See https://www.gnu.org/software/parted/api/modules.html
# for library documentation
device = parted.getDevice(dev["path"])
disk = parted.newDisk(device)
if not disk.check():
raise Fail("Parted disk check failed (TODO: find out how to get details about what check failed)")
partitions = list(disk.partitions)
if len(partitions) > 3:
raise Fail(f"SD card has too many ({len(partitions)}) partitions: reset it with --write-image")
part_boot = partitions[0]
fs = part_boot.fileSystem
if not fs:
raise Fail("SD boot partition has no file system: reset it with --write-image")
if fs.type != "fat32":
raise Fail("SD boot partition is not a fat32 partition: reset it with --write-image")
part_root = partitions[1]
fs = part_root.fileSystem
if not fs:
raise Fail("SD system partition has no file system: reset it with --write-image")
if fs.type != "ext4":
raise Fail("SD system partition is not an ext4 partition: reset it with --write-image")
if len(partitions) == 3:
part_media = partitions[2]
else:
part_media = None
Then we resize the rootfs if needed, potentially removing the media partition to make space for it:
target_root_size = int(round(4 * 1024**3 / device.sectorSize))
need_root_resize = part_root.geometry.end - part_root.geometry.start - 16 < target_root_size
log.info("%s: partition is only %.1fGB and needs resizing",
part_root.path, target_root_size * device.sectorSize / 1024**3)
if need_root_resize:
if part_media:
log.info("%s: partition needs resize: removing media partition %s", part_root.path, part_media.path)
disk.deletePartition(part_media)
part_media = None
# Resize rootfs partition
constraint = device.optimalAlignedConstraint
constraint.minSize = target_root_size
constraint.maxSize = target_root_size
disk.maximizePartition(part_root, constraint)
disk.commit()
subprocess.run(["e2fsck", "-fy", part_root.path], check=True)
subprocess.run(["resize2fs", part_root.path], check=True)
Finally, we create and format the media partition:
if part_media is None:
# Get the last free space
free_space = disk.getFreeSpaceRegions()[-1]
# Create media partition
partition = parted.Partition(
disk=disk,
type=parted.PARTITION_NORMAL,
geometry=free_space)
disk.addPartition(partition=partition, constraint=device.optimalAlignedConstraint)
disk.commit()
log.info("%s media partition created", format_gb(free_space.length * device.sectorSize))
# Create exFAT file system
subprocess.run(["mkexfatfs", "-n", "media", partition.path], check=True)
log.info("%s media partition formatted", format_gb(free_space.length * device.sectorSize))
else:
# Current parted cannot seem to deal with exfat, let's use exfatfsck instead
res = subprocess.run(["exfatfsck", "-n", partitions[2].path], capture_output=True, check=False)
if res.returncode != 0:
raise Fail("SD media partition exFAT file system failed checks:"
" reset it with --write-image and rerun --partition")