[parted-devel] [PATCH 1/2] libparted: enforce dos partition limit

[H. Peter Anvin]

On 01/18/2012 05:23 AM, Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko wrote:
>> The msdos partition table claimed a maximum partition count of 16 but
> would allow you to go beyond that. This resulted in the kernel not being
> informed of
>> those partitions. Corrected to enforce the limit.
> I disagree with this patch being good. msdos layout has no inherent
> limit on number of logical partitions. The above mentioned limit comes
> from how Linux allocates minor SCSI bits and presence of this limit is
> Linux bug. non-SCSI disks on Linux have higher limit. Even on SCSI disks
> it can be circumvented with kpartx. Moreover other kernels and tools are
> probably not affected by this limit.
> If you really want to handle this limit AFAIK it's not specific to just
> msdos partitions, so it has to be on higher level and happen only on
> SCSI disks and only when running under Linux or similarly affected
> kernels (e.g. kOpenSolaris has a similar limit) and has to be reduced to
> a warning since a bug in some other software isn't a reason to create a
> same bug.

Not to mention that newer kernels have an overflow system so it can
handle more partitions.

	-hpa