I've been caught out by this before. All I've wanted to do was modify
the partition table to partition some space that I'd previously left
unallocated.
I noticed that at some point, the ioctls BLKPG_{ADD,DEL}_PARTITION were
added (look at drivers/block/blkpg.c). It looks as if fdisk (et al)
would be able to inform the kernel of changes to the partition table
piecemeal, and thus avoid the problem of requiring a reboot if any
partition on a disk were in use.
The comment has "aeb" in it, so perhaps Andries Brouwer could comment?
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