On 2008/06/23 16:11 (GMT-0500) James Bottomley apparently typed: > On Mon, 2008-06-23 at 17:04 -0400, Greg Freemyer wrote: >> I've seen a lot of end user complaints about libata only supporting >> 15(14?) partitions. Will that limit be moved back to the traditional >> drivers/ide limit as part of this? > Number of partitions is directly related to number of minors, so it > can't be changed without a change in the allocation of major/minor space > in sd ... that could only be done compatibly by permuting the space. > The only other way to do it is incompatibly by changing major (again). I don't know what permuting the space means, but I do know libata affects me in a very big way, being dependent on cross platform tools for partitioning, backup, & restoration; and multibooting virtually every system I touch. LVM is simply no option for these systems, and I have yet to determine whether and how kpartx and device mapper might be used to mitigate the problems caused by trying to work within libata's SCSI limit, a limit which is a major reason why I ceased trying to use SCSI over 5 years ago when disks got too big for few partitions. I've ceased trying to use Fedora & *buntu on more than a cursory basis, using mostly SUSE and Mandriva because they still provide the option to use legacy drivers in their default kernels. Isn't libata at some point supposed to completely displace the legacy IDE driver set? If so, at some point couldn't the IDE major be recycled for libata use for devices >15, or even all of them, maybe in the interim via a compile time choice between either legacy or major 3 but never both simultaneously? -- "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?" Matthew 7:12 NIV Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/ -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
