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Partition problemPartition problemPosted Mar 19, 2004 2:00 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)In reply to: Partition problem by stuart Parent article: Lots of SCSI disks Frankly, I've never understood why partitions are implemented down in the block device layer at all. If it were up to me, I'd use an LVM-style setup for ALL partitions -- i.e. a partition device driver stacked on top of a physical device driver, with the latter being blissfully ignorant of partitions. Then there's no need for partition bits in a SCSI disk minor number. And people with thousands of disks (which of course are not partitioned) wouldn't have to worry about partitions at all.
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Partition problem Posted Mar 19, 2004 14:41 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] Block drivers are blissfully ignorant of partitions - in 2.6. Occasionally somebody brings up the idea of moving partition handling out entirely, all the way to user space. That probably will not happen, though; things like booting from an arbitrary partition get increasingly hard when you do that.
Partition problem Posted Mar 19, 2004 17:01 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] They're not totally ignorant, or it wouldn't have come up here. The SCSI disk driver (sd) has to be aware enough of the existence of partitions to allocate exactly 16 minor numbers for each physical device. If partitions were instead handled by a separate device driver with a separate major number, LVM style, we wouldn't be worrying about how many bits to reserve for partitions.I can't imagine how partitions could be moved all the way out to user space and maintain any significant part of their value.
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