>> If _that_'s what you're concerned about, then just grow the relevant >> fields (and, presumably, change the magic number). > Any change to the label format or semantics would make it be a > completely different object, no longer compatible with anything.
Of course. > If we were going to invent something new that way, we may as well > make it lots better - and ideally compatible with other systems so we > can read one another's drives. > That's what GPT is, and it is already supported. Except for the "better" part, which is a matter of opinion. I don't care for GPT. - Partitions are huge. 128 bytes, when you actually need maybe 18 (and about a quarter of even that is pure future-proofing paranoia). - Partition types are UUIDs. Why use 16 bytes when you have, in the information-theoretic sense, maybe three bits of information? (At least, I can't recall the last time I used a partition type other than FFS, unused, swap, MSDOS, or NTFS - and NTFS only for trying to figure out what's on Windows disks. Six bits, maybe, based on doubling the number of types I see in disklabel_gpt.h. My "18" above assumes 16 bits.) - Partition names(!) are character strings, rather than octet strings or integers (an encoding is specified). This mandates a lot of character-handling crap that does not belong in boot blocks and arguably does not belong in operating systems. It most certainly is not appropriate for the partition table format to mandate/demand the presence of Unicode support in the operating system. It does have one nice thing, a (supposedly-)unique partition identifier. (Of course, nothing can ensure this actually _is_ unique; if nothing else, cloning an entire disk will perforce clone these `unique' IDs.) But it doesn't need to be 16 bytes long! Even adding 14 bytes of partition ID to the 18 bytes above still comes out to only a quarter of the space GPT burns on each partition. > Why would we want to invent something new, just to be different? No, not to be different. To be better. Except, of course, that (I assume) you don't think it _would_ be better. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B