On Sat, Oct 27, 2007 at 04:47:30PM -0400, Doug Ledford wrote:
On Sat, 2007-10-27 at 09:50 +0200, Luca Berra wrote:
On Fri, Oct 26, 2007 at 03:26:33PM -0400, Doug Ledford wrote:
>On Fri, 2007-10-26 at 11:15 +0200, Luca Berra wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 25, 2007 at 02:40:06AM -0400, Doug Ledford wrote:
>> >The partition table is the single, (mostly) universally recognized
>> >arbiter of what possible data might be on the disk. Having a partition
>> >table may not make mdadm recognize the md superblock any better, but it
>> >keeps all that other stuff from even trying to access data that it
>> >doesn't have a need to access and prevents random luck from turning your
>> >day bad.
>> on a pc maybe, but that is 20 years old design.
>
>So? Unix is 35+ year old design, I suppose you want to switch to Vista
>then?
unix is a 35+ year old design that evolved in time, some ideas were
kept, some ditched.
BSD disk labels are still in use, SunOS disk labels are still in use,
i am not a solaris expert, do they still use disk labels under vxvm?
oh, by the way, disklabels do not support the partition type attribute.
partition tables are somewhat on the way out, but only because they are
being replaced by the new EFI disk partitioning method. The only place
where partitionless devices is common is in dedicated raid boxes where
the raid controller is the only thing that will *ever* see that disk.
well i am more used to other os (HP, AIX) where lvm is the common mean of
accessing disk devices
....
by default fdisk misalignes partition tables
and aligning them is more complex than just doing without.
So. You really need to take the time and to understand the alignment of
the device because then and only then can you pass options to mke2fs to
yes and i am not the only person in the world doing that.
>Linux works properly with a partition table, so this is a specious
>statement.
It should also work properly without one.
Most of the time it does. But those times where it can fail, the
failure is due to not taking the precautions necessary to prevent it:
aka labeling disk usage via some sort of partition table/disklabel/etc.
I strongly disagree.
the failure is badly designed software.
Did you stick your mmc card in there during the install of the OS?
My laptop has a built-in mmc slot, so i sometimes leave a card plugged
in. But the mmc thing was just an example, it is not that critical.
i don't count myself as a moron, what i am trying to say is that
partition tables are one way of organizing disk space, not the only one.
Using whole disk devices isn't a means of organizing space. It's a way
to get a rather miniscule amount of space back by *not* organizing the
space.
if i am using, say lvm to organize disk space, a partition table is
unnecessary to the organization, and it is natural not using them.
This whole argument seems to boil down to you wanting to perfectly
optimize your system for your use case which includes controlling the
environment enough that you know it's safe to not partition your disks,
where as I argue that although this works in controlled environments, it
is known to have failure modes in other environments, and I would be
totally remiss if I recommended to my customers that they should take
the risk that you can ignore because of your controlled environment
since I know a lot of my customers *don't* have a controlled environment
such as you do.
The whole argument to me boils down to the fact that not having a partition
table on a device is possible, and software that do not consider this
eventuality is flawed, and recommnding to work-around flawed software is
just digging your head in the sand.
But i believe i did not convince you one ounce more than you convinced
me, so i'll quit this thread which is getting too far.
Regards,
L.
--
Luca Berra -- bluca@xxxxxxxxxx
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