Subject: Re: Another changer, another changer problem
To: Todd Whitesel <toddpw@best.com>
From: Gandhi woulda smacked you <greywolf@starwolf.com>
List: current-users
Date: 10/03/1998 11:42:07
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On Sat, 3 Oct 1998, Todd Whitesel wrote:
* > That's always seemed either like "magic" numbers, or inappripriate
* > overloading to me. It's one thing to have a "convention" where a
* > certain slice represents the entire physical device, but yet another
* > thing entirely to encode that convention into the driver. I'd much
* > rather see another minor number used to represent the raw disk,
* > especially since there's no big shortage of them any more.
*
* 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.
It's _not_ in-band, though. It's in this thing called the "partition
table".
In the case of the i386 port, though, since by convention, b, c, and d
are reserved partitions, this leaves only five partitions available.
#ifdef RISK
however("partitions per disk, partition table sizes");
#endif RISK
...speaking of which, I remember distinctly something really nice
about OSx on the Pyramid 9800 series: the partition tables, though
still hardwired, had 16, rather than 8 partitions per disk. I know
various PROMware, whose manufacturers (like Sun) shall go nameless, make
various assumptions along the lines that "All disks have 8 partitions",
but this is a topic that has been discussed but not fully addressed.
I know der Mouse has come up with his own solution to this problem (hiya,
Mouse!).
--*greywolf;
--
Friends don't let friends use Microsoft.