> Question: Why do block devices know about partitioning? Wouldn't it make
> more sense to have a "disk" driver, that has a list of disks and disk
> drivers attached to it? This way the user doesn't have to deal with
> sd0 vs wd0 vs xy0 vs whatever, they work with /dev/disk0a. The "disk"
> driver would have an ioctl that passed up the ASCII id string returned
> by disks, or by the disk driver itself (or some other identifier, you
> decide). The "disk" driver could deal with partitions in it's own manner.
> 
> What am I missing here? 

1:N fanout of logical-to-physical device mappings.

For instance, N==1 for DOS partitioning.

This implies a device hierarchy needs to be imposed, using directories
to implement the fan out.


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
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Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.