Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 24 Sep 2003 17:18:15 -0700 (PDT) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: rfc: test whether a device has a partition table |
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On Thu, 25 Sep 2003, Andries Brouwer wrote: > > Ha, Linus - didn't you know I am always right?
Yeah, sure. But ...
> But being right in theory - like you say, I have repeated these > things for many years - is not enough to submit a kernel patch. > The post of today was prompted by a mail about > certain USB devices: > > > On closer examination it seems to be the partition table > > which is read ok (as one partition) on W2K and XP > > but Linux (both 2.4 and 2.6) gets really confused and > > thinks there are 4 malformed partitions.
So? There's a bug, and we'll fix it.
The _worst_ thing that can happen is that you have four extra (totally bogus) partitions, and you end up using the whole device.
That's my point about partitioning - not that it's necessarily perfect, but even when it _isn't_ perfect, it's no worse than not partitioning at all.
I know you don't want the kernel to partition at all. But I don't see your point.
> > Linux probably needs to handle this situation more > > gracefully. A local police force bought a bunch of > > these devices for Linux based forensic work. They > > are a bit disappointed at the moment. > > So, now not only theory but also practice is involved, and > we must do something.
Why don't they just read the whole device, if that is what they want to do?
So we have two cases: a) we have a bug in the partitioning code, and don't parse the partition table right: - let's fix the bug b) people don't want to read the partition info at all, as it's bogus - use the whole-device node.
In neither case is your "the kernel shouldn't guess" argument the answer, as far as I can see. And in both cases you _can_ fix it up in user mode if you know how, so clearly the kernel was no worse off guessing.
Linus
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