[ On Sat, October 3, 1998 at 01:20:55 (-0700), Todd Whitesel wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Another changer, another changer problem
>
> Ooh, I would love to see this. I've always hated the "in-band" characteristic
> of the 'c' and 'd' conventions. It would provide an MI-acceptable way of
> getting these things out of the partition table, so that we could use the
> same device names on all ports without worrying.

Not to mention that it would also fix the strange semantics of reading
and writing disk labels.  I.e. one would always be able to write a label
to the raw disk, and then instead of writing to the incore copy you'd
just tell the kernel to read it from the disk again.  Then you'd be 100%
certain that everything was in sync and there'd be absolutely no way of
getting it out of sync.

It would also fix novice problems where people might try and read or
write disk labels from or to partitions that don't start with an offset
of zero.

> Anything that moves us away from implicitly used letters and toward
> documented partition types makes sense to me too.

Well, you still need to index the partitions with something, and letters
are good because there's at least 52 to play with.

However using the current FS_* flags a lot more would be good.  It would
also be good to add a flag that says "read-only" which would be enforced
at the driver layer.  (I suspect you can't do that now because if you
did you'd hose yourself and have to reformat if you made the 'c' (or
'd') partition read-only.)

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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