On 9/30/07, Richard Creighton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Carlos E. R. wrote: <snip> > > That's not quite so now. For instance, the limit on the number of > > partitions has been decreased from 64 to 16 (less than). That's one of the > > consequence of "progress" in the linux field. > > > > - -- > > Cheers, > > Carlos E. R. > > > Someone made an ill-advised decision to change the naming scheme of IDE > drives to be the same as the new SATA drives to be the same as SCSI. > In the process, it inherited the limitations of the SCSI drives. I > can't think of a reason for having done it, but it appears to have been > done in all the distros. I suspect there will be a great gnashing of > teeth when the next release hits the streets and some accomodation will > be forthcoming. As one of the beta testers for upcoming 10.3 SuSE, it > has already proven 'interesting' and caused me personally no end of > frustration. Generally though, Linux's progress has kept pace with the > newer hardware without losing sight of its historical past. This is one > of the few exceptions so far. I bet that there is NO chance that XP, > much less Vista will run on a 386 or a 286... I cranked up 10.2 on a > 486DX-2 the other day just to see it run...slow, but it ran :) > > > Richard
The issue is far deeper than naming conventions. When SATA support was added to the kernel (libata) they leveraged the entire SCSI subsystem due to its quality compared to the IDE subsystem. Then libata got to so good that many (most) of the PATA drivers were re-implemented (by Alan Cox of Redhat) via libata. And then the new implementations got stable enough that the distros decided to move to the libata pata drivers by default. (Fedora was the first to move in the spring.) But, for the foreseeable future you should be able to use the old drivers/ide implementation and get the old functionality (and naming convention). The long term solution is to have libata implement its own full set of infrastructure and no longer fit under the SCSI infrastructure. When that happens the partition limits should be restored to the higher limits. Novell has Tejun Heo supporting libata. He has done 2 major upgrades to it in the last 18 months (new error handling logic for 10.2, PMP support for 10.3, ??? for 11.0). My hope is that his next big project will be the libata infrastructure, but I have not seen anything posted about that yet. Greg -- Greg Freemyer Litigation Triage Solutions Specialist http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregfreemyer The Norcross Group The Intersection of Evidence & Technology http://www.norcrossgroup.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
