Re: devfs

James Bottomley (James.Bottomley@ColumbiaSC.NCR.com)
Thu, 15 Jan 1998 17:47:45 -0500


rgooch@atnf.CSIRO.AU said:
> So on a box with both MS-DOS partition and Solaris slices, how does
> that appear under Linux? What devices are available?

They appear in the extended partitions bit (hd5-16)

Linux doesn't really have enough minor numbers to cope well with this, so only
usable slices are allocated to extended partition labels; the boot time code
tries to tell you what went where, so when I boot my machine it says something
like:

sdc: sdc1 <solaris: [s0] sdc5 [s1] sdc6 [s3] sdc7 [s5] sdc8 [s6] sdc9 >

showing I have one MS-DOS partition on sdc1 containing my solaris slices.

I haven't actually got around to looking at the devfs patches yet. When I do
I'll try to hammer the solaris x86 slice recognition code into a form which
can be used by devfs. You can see that if one disc has both solaris and linux
extended partitions, we rapidly run out of minor numbers.

James