Re: [PATCH] Partitioned loop devices, support for 127 Partitions on SATA, IDE and SCSI

["Alexander E. Patrakov" <patrakov@ums.usu.ru>]

Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> having seen the problems people have when switching from traditional IDE
> drivers to libata if they have more than 15 partitions, I decided to do
> something against it. With this patch (and recreating /dev/loop* nodes)
> it is possible to support up to 127 partitions per loop device
> regardless what the underlying device supports. It works for me
> and has the added bonus that it will be in compatibility mode as long
> as you don't specify the max_part parameter.
> 
> To make migration to the new loop version easy, the new default loop
> behaviour is exactly the same as the old one, so you should not notice
> any breakage. However, if you decide to enable partitioned loop support
> by specifying the max_part parameter, loop devices will have major
> number 240, currently reserved for local/experimental use, and loopN
> will have the minor range [N*max_part, (N+1)*max_part-1].
> 
> For even easier migration, the partition table will NOT be read by
> default on losetup so you even can use unpartitioned loop devices when
> being no longer in compat mode. If you want to activate partitions for
> /dev/loopN, just issue "blockdev --rereadpt /dev/loopN" and the
> partitions will magically appear in /sys/block/loopN/.

Why not just use EVMS? Partition code is supposed to be moved to userspace
anyway.

-- 
Alexander E. Patrakov