Re: rereading a partition
On Mon, Dec 18, 2000 at 08:58:56AM -0500, Neal H Walfield wrote:
> The Hurdish way to solve this problem is in userspace via a translator.
> A server, let's call it `disk_part', would translate a harddrive based on
> the partition table possibly creating a hierarchy as follows:
>
> /dev/hda <-- disk_part
> /1 <-- store_io
> /2 <-- store_io
> ...
Yep, that would be cool. It's very hurdish and removes another burden from
Mach. Oh, and it would allow to implement new partition schemes. A quick
look into the Linux config reveals:
[*] Advanced partition selection
[ ] Acorn partition support (NEW)
[ ] Alpha OSF partition support (NEW)
[ ] Amiga partition table support (NEW)
[ ] Atari partition table support (NEW)
[ ] Macintosh partition map support (NEW)
[*] PC BIOS (MSDOS partition tables) support
[ ] BSD disklabel (FreeBSD partition tables) support (NEW)
[ ] Solaris (x86) partition table support (NEW)
[ ] Unixware slices support (NEW)
[ ] SGI partition support (NEW)
[ ] Ultrix partition table support (NEW)
[ ] Sun partition tables support (NEW)
Implementing such functionality in GNU Mach is very unsexy. I don't think that
writing such a translator would be terrible hard, and note that you don't
need to change anything else in the Hurd, only the translator settings of
your fs.
But there is one glitch. We need to be able to open the root filesystem at
bootstrap (for example, ext2fs.static). Maybe the functionality should be
put in a library, and enable libstore to make use of it, so you can either
do what Neal says above or, alternatively, specify the partition format and
partition directly to libstore and have a 'partition' store type. This
circumvent the above scheme, but only for bootstrap. I mean like this:
ext2fs -T partition dos,1:device:hd0
instead
ext2fs -T device hd0s1
How does this look? (The first part of "dos,1" is the partition type, the
second the partition id. Alternatively, you could use "bsd,a" etc).
Thanks,
Marcus
--
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de
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