From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Michael Tokarev Subject: Re: why not make everything partitionable? Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2006 22:26:10 +0300 Message-ID: <455B69D2.4040008@tls.msk.ru> References: <20061115172234.GA32276@piper.oerlikon.madduck.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=KOI8-R Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20061115172234.GA32276@piper.oerlikon.madduck.net> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: linux-raid mailing list List-Id: linux-raid.ids martin f krafft wrote: > Hi folks, > > you cannot create partitions within partitions, but you can well use > whole disks for a filesystem without any partitions. It's usually better to have a partition table in place, at least on x86. Just to stop possible confusion - be it from kernel, or from inability to identify disks properly (think [c]fdisk displaying labels) or from anything else. But ok. > Along the same lines, I wonder why md/mdadm distinguish between > partitionable and non-partitionable in the first place. Why isn't > everything partitionable? It's both historic (before, there was no partitionable md arrays), and due to the fact that the number of partitions is limited by only single major number (ie, 256 (sub)partitions max). Maybe there are other reasons - I don't have a defite answer. /mjt