On 2008/05/31 09:52 (GMT-0400) Jerry Feldman apparently typed:
"Carlos E. R." wrote:
Yes, you have seen, past tense. You will not see them in the future, libata does not support them.
Just because libata does not support them doesn't mean you won't see partitions beyond #15. It has been proposed that libata's next rewrite will exclude the arbitrary SCSI limit. In the meantime, kpartx and device mapper can be used to access them if you can figure out how they work. AFAIK, there are no installers that include this facility.
The disk themselves support unlimited numbers of partitions, but the operating system doesn't. Currently, Linux is more limited in this respect that Windows: you are limited to a total 15 partitions per disk, of which 1..4 are primaries, and 5..15 are logical. Number 0 is the entire disk (that's where 2^4 comes into).
I was thinking in terms of the hardware and partition tables, not Linux device mappings. I stand corrected in that you can only have 15 numbered partitions 1 - 15.
The number usable for filesystems through libata is actually 14. One of 1-4 has to be an extended for any logicals to exist. More than 15 can certainly exist; they just can't be accessed directly via libata.
And as you mentioned, LVM is not portable.
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