Re: rereading a partition

[Glenn McGrath <bug1@optushome.com.au>]

Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> 
> 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
> 

Would writing a hurd translator for partitions also fix the problem with
parititon sizes limited to 1GB ?

Im still finding my way with the hurd, if i get a better grip on it i
would be prepared to have a go.


Glenn