Subject: Re: A new partition handling scheme: wedges
To: Wolfgang Solfrank <ws@tools.de>
From: Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@chassiron.ensta.fr>
List: tech-kern
Date: 01/26/1998 14:46:39
On Jan 26, Wolfgang Solfrank wrote
> > One in the MBR for NetBSD, one for FreeBSD, one for Linux ...
> > This leave only one extended partition. How much partition
> > can we put in an extended partition ?
> > If we make recursive partitions, I wonder if Linux could read them ...
> 
> Extended partitions are just like the complete disk, i.e. they have a MBR
> of their own and thus can have again 4 partitions.  And yes, AFAIK that's
> the way Linux _does_ their partitioning...
> 

Yes. But in the config above, you have 4+3=7 partitions. We can put extended
partitions in an extended partition, but I don't know if other OSes
can handle that.

This also mean that partitions informations are distributed among all the disk,
so you increase probability to loose parts of it.
I'd prefer to keep the possibility of a centralised partitions info, at last
for NetBSD-only disks.

The advantage of the actual system is that you have in NetBSD a partition
layout indepedant of the other OSs sharing the same disk.
The incovenient is that the user has to make a NetBSD partition table
coherent with the other OSes.

--
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.
email: bouyer@rp.lip6.fr
       bouyer@ensta.fr
--