Bug#368741: split partman to allow installations to MTD (flash)

[Geert Stappers <stappers@stappers.nl>]

Package: partman
Severity: wishlist

On Sat, May 13, 2006 at 01:25:08PM +0200, Geert Stappers wrote:
> On Mon, May 08, 2006 at 06:50:00PM +0200, Martin Michlmayr wrote:
> > Flash is getting cheaper and there are now devices which have enough
> > flash to install a full blown Debian to it.  My question is how to
> > change partman to support installations to flash.  Under Linux, MTD is
> > used to access flash: it provides both a block and char device of the
> > device.  A file system like JFFS is normally used.  MTD doesn't have
> > traditional partitions like disks; in terms of the installer, we
> > should probably just take the existing partitions that are recognized
> > by the kernel (i.e. you cannot delete or create partitions, or resize
> > them).
> > 
> > How can this be handled in partman?
> 
> AFAICT is the monolithic nature of partman the problem.
> Partman does partitioning, mkfs and matching devices to mountpoints.
> If partman would be split in those three parts,
> then we can reuse the matching of devices to mountpoints
> and do the "partitioning" and "mkfs" elsewhere, e.g. in the "BOOTROM"
> of the embedded device.
> 
> Another advantage of that split would allow partitioning with other
> tools (think "partition magic", "FAI partitioner" or other favorites )
> 
> Rigth now it hard to do that and surely hard to do in preseeding.

Perhaps we don't need a split, but only more entrypoints into partman.

So we enter partman at the point it has done partitioning
can continue from there.


Cheers
Geert Stappers