Felix Miata
A SATA system with > 15 partitions was never ever supported!
I well understand that. However https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=218122 summary says "Support more than 15 partitions on libata", not "Support more than 15 partitions on PATA on libata". Unless I grossly misunderstand the nature of libata, I expect libata to mean libata HD support regardless whether used for PATA or SATA.
There are several ways to approach the > 15 partitions problem: * Use PATA for PATA disk (for people migrating from older distros) * Use LVM and you don't have a problem (preferred way for new installations) * Use some hacks with devicemapper to support more than 15 partitions. Bug 218122 is one such hack. We wanted to use it for the migration issue. It was not intented for new installations - for those, please use LVM!
If I'm not wrong in my understanding, and yet >15 on SATA is unlikely to be supported now or within next year or so, then the summary of that bug seems to be wrong, and should be changed to remove any implication of applicability to SATA either now or in the future.
More than 15 are supported with LVM since ages. The problem we're talking about is migration - and therefore the bug is called on libata. Seeing your confusion, I guess it should have been stated "libata for PATA devices". Hannes has to answer the rest of the email - and I guess you should start this discussion on the Linux kernel mailing list or on the libata development list. We're speaking about a limitation of the upstream kernel, Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, Director Platform/openSUSE, aj@suse.de SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126