Roman Zippel wrote:
there is no need for a synthetic partition table.
the synthetic PTBL hides the differences between various PTBL schemas and so is great for making the data transfer much easier.Why should I deal with that in first place??? I don't have any Atari disks and I have no intention of creating one.
As soon as you partition disk you create one, don't you?
Forcing it OTOH means it prevents me from creating my own partitions.you can create your own partitions - just do it on the host side! If you insist on playing with fdisk on linux-m68k then simply use the IDE disk drives but I believe that most people in most cases simply don't need the fdisk and will gladly skip it and mount the partitions directly.Why are you trying so hard to talk away that people might find it useful to partition their devices under Linux?
I don't say it's not useful (for somebody who likes playing with disk partitioning software) - I just say that it's not needed at all for majority of users. Being useful is very different from being required. And if it's not required people will gladly skip it :-)
IDE devices are harder to setup, so I'd prefer to point people to the simple option, which _requires_ that they can use a normal installer to install Linux on these devices, which usually requires to partition them.As long as that is not possible, it's simply not an usable option.
The installer sees the existing partitions and can use them, correct? You don't have to repartition an existing disk partitions in order to be able to install Linux. Or am I wrong?
If I wanted to point people to the simple option I'd tell them:1) start ARAnyM, go to its setup, create a partition large enough for the whole system, say 1 GB.
2) run debian installer and when it comes to partitioning simply use the found partition and continue.
That's it. No need to teach them how to partition a drive, how much to reserve for this or that... And once the existing partition gets full you can simply add another one...
Besides all this talk - the IDE drives are mapped as whole drives and you can partition them, can't you? And setting up IDE disk drive is actually easier than setting up the SCSI partition because you don't have to enter the partition ID - setting up the filename is all you need. So I don't take your argument that setting IDE is worse than setting the SCSI/partition.
PetrP.S. I really need to get a working kernel with your nfblock implementation to stop talking about how it should be working and simply try out how it is working currently. But I belive I'll find out that it works how I explain - otherwise it would be a bug in the implementation ;-)