On Wed, 2004-06-23 at 23:15 -0500, Matt Domsch wrote: > So, the question becomes: how many does it make sense to try to read? > I can picture an install scenario where we would want to install > LVM/RAID across all available BIOS disks (2 for RAID1, 3 for RAID5, > more?), and would want to use the mbr_signature mechanism to determine > which BIOS disks correspond to which Linux disks. Yes? Yep. Actually, I could see it being interesting to know the extent of all of the BIOS mappings. I seem to remember that the BIOS can only map up to 8 which doesn't seem like it would be that absurd to keep information about. > If so, I'll look into storing more signatures. Currently EDD allows up > to 6 devices, but that's because the EDD 3.0 data chunk is so large > and space is limited in the zero-block. We could conceiveably store > more mbr_signatures (they're only 4 bytes each) than 6, if it would be > useful to do so. Six is more useful than one :) My guess is that in most cases, people will only care about the first few, but as much as can be done doesn't strike me as a horrible idea. Of course, if the BIOS can map an unlimited number, then some sort of limit probably makes sense, just to avoid silly amounts of information being kept around on machines connected to a SAN or the like. Jeremy
