Re: Alpha no longer recognises certain partition tables (v2.6.38)

[Linus Torvalds]

On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 2:06 AM, Michael Cree <mcree@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> v2.6.38 boot reports it can't recognise the partition table on the system
> disk on my Alpha and panics when it can't find the root device.
>
> It worked at v2.6.38-rc7.
>
> While I haven't done a bisect to fully verify I nevertheless suggest the
> following patch as the likely cause:
>
> 1eafbfe Fix corrupted OSF partition table parsing

That sounds likely. What does something like the attached do? In
particular, what's the printed-out value of the OSF npartitions thing?

Also, it's quite possible that we should raise the value of
MAX_OSF_PARTITIONS. If I checked it right, the d_partitions[] array
starts at byte offset 148 in the sector, and it's 16 bytes in size, so
there _could_ be up to 22 partitions there. The fact that we had
defined the 'struct disklabel' to only contain 8 partitions is I think
from documentation, not a technical "there can be only eight".

                                  Linus
 fs/partitions/osf.c |    4 ++--
 1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/fs/partitions/osf.c b/fs/partitions/osf.c
index be03a0b..fcab201 100644
--- a/fs/partitions/osf.c
+++ b/fs/partitions/osf.c
@@ -68,8 +68,8 @@ int osf_partition(struct parsed_partitions *state)
 	}
 	npartitions = le16_to_cpu(label->d_npartitions);
 	if (npartitions > MAX_OSF_PARTITIONS) {
-		put_dev_sector(sect);
-		return 0;
+		printk("OSF: %u partitions\n", npartitions);
+		npartitions = MAX_OSF_PARTITIONS;
 	}
 	for (i = 0 ; i < npartitions; i++, partition++) {
 		if (slot == state->limit)