Russell> Jes Sorensen writes:
>> Anyway I would very much like to get this patch in before 2.4 as it
>> is a 95KB patch. As potentially it affects all other architectures
>> (though it shouldn't break for anyone) I reckon it is probably a
>> good idea to get it tested.
Russell> There is a problem lurking in there, which exists when you
Russell> have partition information occupying various different
Russell> locations on the disk.
Russell> The above patch allows 'partition modules', which are a bad
Russell> thing in this situation, since it does mean that the kernel
Russell> behaviour becomes indeterminant, or even impossible to get
Russell> the correct behaviour with a pre-compiled kernel.
[snip]
Russell> When these people run Linux on their machines, the order
Russell> which the partitions are detected becomes vitally important.
Russell> If the BIOS partition table is present in sector 0 along with
Russell> an ADFS boot block, it is possible for the disk to be
Russell> interpreted in two different ways. If the BIOS partition
Russell> table is detected first, then the disk will be interpreted
Russell> incorrectly. If the ADFS boot block with a non-ADFS
Russell> partition is detected first, then it will be correct.
I really can't see the problem with this, it sounds like a special
case Acorn problem and in that case it is simple to disallow people to
enable other partition table types on those machines.
Jes
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