[parted-devel] [PATCH 1/2] libparted: enforce dos partition limit

Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko phcoder at gmail.com
Wed Jan 18 13:23:23 UTC 2012


 > The msdos partition table claimed a maximum partition count of 16 but 
would allow you to go beyond that. This resulted in the kernel not being 
informed of
 > those partitions. Corrected to enforce the limit.
I disagree with this patch being good. msdos layout has no inherent 
limit on number of logical partitions. The above mentioned limit comes 
from how Linux allocates minor SCSI bits and presence of this limit is 
Linux bug. non-SCSI disks on Linux have higher limit. Even on SCSI disks 
it can be circumvented with kpartx. Moreover other kernels and tools are 
probably not affected by this limit.
If you really want to handle this limit AFAIK it's not specific to just 
msdos partitions, so it has to be on higher level and happen only on 
SCSI disks and only when running under Linux or similarly affected 
kernels (e.g. kOpenSolaris has a similar limit) and has to be reduced to 
a warning since a bug in some other software isn't a reason to create a 
same bug.


-- 
Regards
Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko




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