Re: SCSI DVD-RAM partitions

[Thomas Heinz <thomasheinz@gmx.net>]

Hi Christoph

You wrote:
> While adding support for partitions on sr is trivial it has a huge
> drawback: it's chaning the dev_t space by using up device numbers
> for partitions, so /dev/sr0 ff will have different device numbers
> with that change applied.  I have an old patch that's supposed to
> enable support for partitioned scsi removable devices at
> http://rechner.lst.de/~hch/hacks/sr-parts.diff, I'm not sure it
> actually ever worked (but you should get the basic idea from it)

Ok, thanks for your valuable input. In fact, I thought about making
the device available both as /dev/srX and /dev/sdX at the same time
in order to support partitions. In my case it would even suffice to
make it available as /dev/sdX instead of /dev/srX.

Since I have no expert knowledge about this topic, I would be
interested in the general attitude towards "partitions on SCSI
DVD-RAM media / SCSI removable devices":
- Are partitions intentionally not supported? If so, why?
- Does it usually work but not with my specific DVD-RAM model?
   If so, why?
- Do you think that this should be fixed?


Please note that personally, I can live with the "losetup hack"
since it is easy enough to write a program which encapsulates
partition mounting. However, there might be people which would
prefer plugging in a (possibly pre-)partitioned medium and
having the partitions work out of the box in the expected way.


Regards,

Thomas