New device drivers don't see beyond 15 partitions in fc7

[Clyde E. Kunkel]

Rob Andrews wrote:
> On 21-Dec-2006 22:57.31 (GMT), Clyde E. Kunkel wrote:
>  > With the change from traditional /dev/hd* type device nodes to /dev/sd* 
>  > type nodes, I see that the highest partition number that can be used is 
>  > 15.  Will this change so that higher numbers will be available?  I do 
>  > have a system that has a drive with almost 30 small partitions used in a 
>  > research effort and the number of partitions has not been an issue thru fc6.
> 
> devices.txt says that hdN device numbering supports up to 63 partitions per
> disk. It also says that sdN device numbering follows the same trend as hdN
> numbering (unified partition table handling, and all).
> 
> I didn't think that PC BIOS partition tables supported > 15 partitions. To
> the best of my knowledge, the 63-partition numbering scheme was there for
> partition table formats that *did* support it (Amiga RDB, BSD disk label,
> etc).
> 
> To quote the fdisk(8) manual page:
> 
>     The partition is a device name followed by a partition number.
>     For example, /dev/hda1 is the first partition on the first IDE
>     hard disk in the system. Disks can have up to 15 partitions.
>     See also /usr/src/linux/Documentation/devices.txt.
> 
> To reiterate what another writer has said, lvm is a smashing way of working.
> And it has a much more flexible ("meaningful") volume naming scheme.
> 

I do use LVM extensively and appreciate its flexibility.  The use of > 
15 partitions on one spindle was a deliberate design to accommodate a 
specific research method.  AFAIK, grub will not boot from an LV, but 
beyond that, not sure if there is any other software that would prohibit 
converting everything to LVM.

(BTW, will grub be modified to boot from an LV?)

-- 
Regards,

Old Fart
(my reply-to address is "munged" to defeat spambots)