In article <201602082342.u18Ngfw5029915@server>, John Nemeth <[email protected]> wrote: >On Feb 8, 3:02pm, Swift Griggs wrote: >} On Mon, 8 Feb 2016, John Nemeth wrote: >} > Standard BSD disklabels have the same limitation as MBRs as they use >} > 32-bit numbers for partition start and size. >} >} I take it that there is more to it than that... ? I'm sure I'm >} over-simplifying, but simply changing the long to a int64_t I suppose has >} greater impact and implications for other tools and code that read >} disklabels, right ? > > Those problems could be solved. Obviously, old tools wouldn't >work with the new format; however, new tools could work with either >format. But, the first issue is that it is an on-disk format. >You need to find the space to expand the disklabel and do so in a >manner that doesn't break anything. As demonstrated by OpenBSD, >supposedly, this is possible (I have not examined it in any depth >to assure myself that it doesn't break anything; I am simply aware >of it).
OpenBSD has done it. I've made the same code changes but I stopped just before committing because we have dozens of custom copies of disklabel code that would need to be adjusted and tested. christos
