Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2002 05:02:47 -0600 From: "Mike Meyer" <mwm-dated-1011265367.36e001@mired.org> To: Bjarne Wichmann Petersen <freebsd.nospam@mekanix.dk>, swear@blarg.net (Gary W. Swearingen) Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Limitations of BSD-slices. Message-ID: <15424.6103.544570.250164@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <78852280@toto.iv>
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Gary W. Swearingen <swear@blarg.net> types: > Bjarne Wichmann Petersen <freebsd.nospam@mekanix.dk> writes: > > I've found that FreeBSD is still "hogging" a primary partition/slice No, you've found that the default install is doing that. FreeBSD certainly understands extended slices, and you can put BSD partitions in them with no problem. So clearly you can put a FreeBSD system in an extended slice. Getting it to boot is a more interesting problem. > > and I've only got 4 partition within a slice, a-d being reserved and h > > being the maximum. Again, you're describing the default installation, not real limits. The only partitions that are reserved are a and c. If you're going to boot a partition, it has to be a. It may have to start at offset zero to boot as well, but I haven't tried changing that one. Various things get upset if c isn't the whole disk, but you're free to use it it for data if you want to. There are no restriction on b and d. In other words, you actually get 7 partitions in a slice to use, with the caveat that you have to boot from a. > > Why is it limited to h? > I'll guess that there's a 8-bit field somewhere that would be awkward to > "fix". Why guess when the source is available? It's a three-bit field, and it's part of the device number used for references to disk devices. All the changes *should* be encapsulated in disklabel.h. The changes are both obvious and straightforward. There's a reference to reboot.h there, which has an 8-bit field for partitions, so you'd have to fix that if you wanted more than 256 partitions. I have no idea whether the resulting system would work properly or not. You certainly couldn't install that kernel and then boot multiuser on a system that was installed with the old value in place. I'd be surprised if it you could get to a single-user prompt. All of which is irrelevant to the question of "why is it limited to h?". The answer to that one is "Because 8 is enough." <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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