Hi,
On Fri, Apr 07, 2000 at 02:05:51PM -0600, Jeff V. Merkey wrote:
> > Shouldn't this be handled by the partition-detection code anyhow
> > (/proc/partitions et al)?
>
> Probably, but this would mean putting more code into the 2.4 release. I
> looked at the partition stuff in genhd.c - it should go here -- except
> for one point. NWFS does not share the Unix limitation of "one
> partition - one file system tree".
There is nothing in Linux which enforces this. You do need to have
a block device to identify a fs superblock, but there is no reason why
the filesystem cannot access other block devices too. Ext3 will be
using this to place the journal on a separate disk from the main
filesystem, and we have had patches against ext2 in the past to allow
the filesystem to span multiple block devices.
As far as the block device layer is concerned, all you do is submit
block IO requests to devices. It doesn't care which devices, and it
doesn't care who is doing the IO.
So, scan the gendisk list for the available partitions, and do what
you like with them. Your filesystem should not need to make any
other assumptions about what is going on in the block device layer.
The partition list is just a list of available devices. It doesn't
represent filesystems in ANY way, so you can bind multiple such
partitions together in NWFS if you want to.
--Stephen
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