Disk partitioning (was: Daemon's Advocate article)

[Brooks Davis]

On Wed, Mar 03, 2004 at 04:05:52PM -0500, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
> At 12:34 PM -0800 3/3/04, Matthew Dillon wrote:
> >:>   There may be problems with NetBSD and OpenBSD in this environment,
> >:>   due to the partition naming conventions.  I don't expect Dragonfly
> >:>   to have any problems.
> >:
> >: NetBSD and OpenBSD have the advantage of allowing the specification
> >: of subartitions outside the slice and therefore the use to access
> >: e.g. such hidden partitions from point 1. FreeBSD has a limit
> >: of 8 partitions, OpenBSD and maybe NetBSD too of 16.
> >:
> >:Joerg
> >
> >    There is actually room for 16, but the dev minor number does
> >    not have enough bits to specify more then 8.
> 
> Could we do something slimy, like have another device major-number
> which means "the second 8-partitions of a disk"?

What's the urgency?  You've got four slices without using extended
one which gives 32 partitions easily.  If you need more then that on
x86, your time would probalby be better spent figuring out the issues
involved in booting from a GPT partition and cleaning up the code in
sbin/gpt on FreeBSD.  That would give you nearly 16K partitions per disk
which ought to be good enough for almost anyone.  We're going to have
to go that way soon anyway since >2TB disks don't really work with MBR
partitions.

-- Brooks

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