I have lately installed FreeBSD to see if it has any
cool features which could be assimilated into linux.
For that I decied to use my test box.
It has 1 6.4gb hdd which I dived as follows :
hda = lilo boot manager to boot to hda{1,2,3,4}={nt,bsd,linux,other}
hda1 = NT 5.0 [NT boot manager]
hda2 = FreeBSD Extended parition [BSD kernel's BM]
hda3 = Debian 1.3.1 [lilo]
hda4 = extended [lilo]
hda5 = RedHat 5.0
hda6 = unused
hda7 = unused
hda8 = Linux swap (shared by RH and Debian)
It worked fine. Then I got idea that I want to read BSD
parition Using Linux. For debian on hda3 it worked fine
(beside swap being missing) but for RH on hda5 it
came out to be nightmare. Why?
Well if I add support for BSD-style extended paritons
then hda2 gets expanded into hda{5,6,7,8}
and extended parition on hda4 becomes hda{9,10,11,12}
so redhat becomes on hda9 and swap on hda12 depending
if kernel does support BSD style parition table or
does not not OUH!
Now if I look into the FS support in 2.1.x series
we there also have extened paritions for SMD (sun)
Solaris x86, and Mac beside the forementioned
DOS and BSD (FreeBSD) extended paritions.
This all seems be kind of nuance, and even worse
it remind me old days of horros with M$ stuff where
you had A:,B:,C:,D:,E:,F: and so on and whey would all
change their place if you did modify system slightly.
(specifcally cd drive liked to become anything from d:
to z:)
I think it is something what should be addressed,
as I think the the current form it is kind of
problem if not nuance. After all part of Linux
philosophy is to work with everything. and I
definitely don't want see DOS-II comeback!
One of solutions I could think of was of idea of sub-slices
Ie, instead of hda{5,6,7,8} for extended parition of hda2
or hda4 use hda2{a,b,c,d} for extended parition of
hda2 and hda4{a,b,c,d} for extended parition of hda4
I belive it would work either way and would not break
everything (what includes, lilo, /etc/fstab, and everything
what refers to given parition)
Comments?
-Adam
PS : fdisk should be updated as well currently it reads only
dos extended partitions, but it is not kernel issue.
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