On Tue, 3 Sep 2002 Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl wrote:
>
> Why?
> Because in some cases it is undesirable.
Again, Why?
You can always use the flat device as-is.
> Because in some cases it crashes the kernel.
But moving it to user space would cause the kernel to crash anyway. Bugs
are bugs.
> Because it involves guessing and heuristics.
The same guesses and heuristics would have to be in user space.
> Because policy belongs in user space.
It's not policy. It's a fact of life that disks need to be split up into
parts, and the partitioning schemes are well-defined and shared across
multiple operating systems.
> Yes - that is my main point: doing it on demand. On demand only.
But I actually _agree_ with this.
However, that has nothing to do with whether it is in user space or kernel
space. In many ways it is _easier_ to do on demand in kernel space: when
somebody opens /dev/sda1 and it isn't partitioned yet, you know it needs
to be.
The fact that partitioning right now is to some degree handled by device
drivers is a problem, but that's not a user space vs kernel space issue.
It's slowly getting moved to higher levels.
Linus
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