Re: Problems with SATA and >15 partitions

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de> writes:

> On Sun, May 30, 2004 at 01:11:30PM +0200, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
>> As for 3 this is a general problem of scsi disks. Wouldn't it be
>> possible for the code that scans partitions to allocate device nodes
>> dynamically for partitions >15 so that users with devfs or udev active
>> would get additional device nodes created? Alternatively a userspace
>> program could scan the partition block and create devices with the
>> device mapper coresponding to each partition. Both aproaches would
>> allow for >15 partition.
>
> No, theres lots of code in kernelspace that assumes a partitioned disk
> has a block of minors.  Use a volume manager instead of traditional
> partitions if you need more than 15 subdivions of a disk.

Ide disks have a block of 64 minors per disk, scsi only 16. So it
can't be hardcoded that much.

and

Using device mapper to create the extra devices for hidden partition
would be using a volume manager (the linux kernel part).

MfG
        Goswin