-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Tuesday, 2008-12-30 at 17:44 -0500, Bob S wrote:
Hello SuSE people,
Back when the libata sytem was adopted, limiting partitions to 15, there was quite a bit of fuss over this decision by many of us on this list because many of us like to run multiple OS's and were automatically limited by this change, especially as hard drives became bigger and bigger.
As I recall the kernel devs refused to do anything about it and later on it was said that a solution would be forthcoming using device mapper or some such method. IIRC jdd or somebody experimented with device mapper and was able to create partitions beyond the limitatiion, but seemed complicated and a lot of work which should not have been necessary.
Also, IIRC Greg and Carlos had a short discussion about this back in October when installing 11.0 or 11.1B. I don't subscribe to the dev's list. Too much for me.
Has it happened yet ? Has it been forgotten ? Am I opening old wounds here? I still have half of a 500 GB disk left with only two partitions available and would like to know.
Very curious that you ask precisely now. The subject popped out two days ago in the Spanish list and Cristian mentioned that the new kernel 2.6.28 has new features that break the partition limit, via patches pushed by Tejun Heo of SUSE/Novell. I have very little info on this. ] Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.28 - Part 1: ATA support and block layer ] http://www.heise-online.co.uk/open/Kernel-Log-Coming-in-2-6-28-Part-1-ATA-su... ] ] "(...) A number of small block layer patches by Libata developer Tejun ] Heo further removes the limitation of a maximum of 15 hard drive ] partitions on data media driven via Libata." http://lwn.net/Articles/303270/ http://lwn.net/Articles/290141/ [Block layer: integrity checking and lots of partitions] This last article is very interesting; it is from last July, thoug. What it does is use dynamic minor limits, asigned on the fly, considering that the udev system assigns nodes on the fly anyway: meaning basically unlimited number of partitions. The article says it is unclear wether this will be adopted by al distros, anyway (the change of names from hdX to sdX hurted many), but considering who made the patches and who he works for, we'll see them in 11.2 :-D Another hack I'm experimenting with, is that besides LVM (which I dislike and doen't solve my needs) you can repartition a raid partition. Ie, convert /dev/md0 into /dev/md0p1, /dev/md0p2, etc. I haven't finished exploring this yet, I'm unsure if the kernel recognises them and how many of them. - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAklbXfMACgkQtTMYHG2NR9V/PQCdFFN+218BQKSZ5/JTyLYSTIcK b/cAnRl+vOijnklQRzMFIAbfnwfb/s/9 =whGJ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org