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SubjectRe: Tentative patch: modularized disk partition systems in 2.3.99-pre2-5
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Adam J. Richter writes:
> My idea was based on information on page 179 of _Advanced
> MSDOS Programming_, second edition, by Ray Duncan, which stated
> that valid MSDOS boot sectors always started with one of these
> two patterns (in hexademical):

You may have gotten it from "Advanced MSDOS Programming", but a lot of
non-x86 architectures do not have "MSDOS" partition tables, and
therefore don't contain these magic numbers. In fact, these may
well be just a bunch of zeros on all the other partition types,
thereby shooting a rather large hole in an otherwise sound idea.

> However, I am much more interested in a facility mentioned by
> "Guest Section DW" (dwguest@win.tue.nl) where userland programs can
> define the partitioning to the kernel directly. This would be much
> better, since the code would not consume unswappable kernel space,
> it would not have to be released with every new kernel, the would
> not be copies for each kernel version in /lib/modules, it would be
> more flexible, and it could more easily share code with fdisk-like
> programs. Unfortunately, I am having trouble finding this facility,
> since it looks like the only routines that call add_gd_partition are
> those partitioning modules. Anyhow, if this facility really exists,
> I would appreciate a pointer to it, because I would love to move
> partition table reading entirely to userland.

But then how do you locate the root partition on the disk if the
kernel does not know how to read the partition table on that disk?

This needs to be in the kernel, and again, it probably won't be a
MSDOS table for most non-x86 architectures.
_____
|_____| ------------------------------------------------- ---+---+-
| | Russell King rmk@arm.linux.org.uk --- ---
| | | | http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/~rmk/aboutme.html / / |
| +-+-+ --- -+-
/ | THE developer of ARM Linux |+| /|\
/ | | | --- |
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