Re: turning off COMPAT_386BSD_MBRPART in disklabel

[David Laight <david%l8s.co.uk@localhost>]

On Thu, Feb 03, 2011 at 02:56:35AM +0000, David Holland wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 05:40:20PM +0100, Matthias Drochner wrote:
>  > > PR 44496 notes that COMPAT_386BSD_MBRPART is still enabled in
>  > > disklabel(8), even though it was turned off by default in the kernel
>  > > early in 4.99.x. The PR also notes that it's not harmless to leave it
>  > > on.
>  > 
>  > The PR rather leads to the conclusion that the support for
>  > old Partition IDs in disklabel(8) is suboptimal.
>  > Originally, the code did only consider a partition with the
>  > old ID if no new one was found. This apparently got broken
>  > when extended partition support was added years later.
> 
> Yeah, that's a valid point. I guess the question then is whether
> fixing that will prevent any problematic cases from arising...  and
> whether at this point it's worth worrying about.

Possibly the code should be willing to locate and process such a label.
Possibly even write it back.
But it probably shouldn't 'corrupt' it - ie leave it as a valid label
(doesn't it contain sector number relative to the ptn iteself?
so can't describe any other parts of the disk?)

        David

-- 
David Laight: david%l8s.co.uk@localhost