> But I hope he makes precisely this: a kernel that does not do any
> partition reading of its own.
I disagree, if only because of backwards compatibility issues.
On a conceptual level I think you're right. However, it will break too
many standard installations as is.
If/when we have a reasonable initrd setup that is usable, we could do some
automatic partitioning of devices that are available at bootup to minimize
the impact, but I don't think it is realistic otherwise.
Compare it with mounting.
It would be very bad if the kernel automatically mounted all
filesystems in sight. So, user space tells what to mount.
But at boot time there is a special situation.
In the end we want to have an initrd that mounts the rootfs,
but today we give kernel command line parameters with
rootfstype= and root=.
In a similar way it is bad that the kernel automatically tries
to interpret some data on a block device as a partition table.
The user can tell the kernel. (Yes, today.)
But at boot time there is a special situation.
In the end we want to have an initrd that does the partition reading,
but now we could give a kernel command line parameter with
rootpttype= and have the kernel only parse the partition table
of the root device.
Andries
[Yes, a shock, but very easy for people to add
blockdev --rereadpt /dev/foo
(or a partx call) in some bootscripts.]
[Don't think that I actually propose doing this today as the default,
but it would be a very small patch to add this as an optional
behaviour. But there is today, and there is the faraway goal.
The faraway goal is: no partition table reading in the kernel.
And that influences designing today what to do on media change.
Already today I would consider it entirely reasonable if there
was no automatic partition table reading after a media change.]
NO.
The point about backwards compatibility is that things WORK.
There's no point in comparing things to how you _want_ them to work. The
only thing that matters for bckwards compatibility is how they work
_today_.
And your suggestion would break every single installation out there. Not
"maybe a few". Every single one.
(yeah, you could find some NFS-only setup that doesn't break. Big deal).
And backwards compatibility is extremely important.
Linus
From: Thunder from the hill <hidden> Date: 2002-09-02 21:44:27
Hi,
On Mon, 2 Sep 2002, Linus Torvalds wrote:
The point about backwards compatibility is that things WORK.
There's no point in comparing things to how you _want_ them to work. The
only thing that matters for bckwards compatibility is how they work
_today_.
And your suggestion would break every single installation out there. Not
"maybe a few". Every single one.
(yeah, you could find some NFS-only setup that doesn't break. Big deal).
And backwards compatibility is extremely important.
dep_bool ' New mountalike partitioning code' CONFIG_PARTMOUNTING CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL CONFIG_WHATEVER
Or, since we're talking about the future:
<bool name="PARTMOUNTING">
<title>
New mount-alike partitioning code
</title>
<dep name="EXPERIMENTAL" sense="include" />
<dep name="WHATEVER" sense="exclude" />
</bool>
See? New Deal is for the ones that were annoyed by the old one.
Thunder
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On Mon, Sep 02, 2002 at 03:43:56PM -0600, Thunder from the hill wrote:
quoted
The faraway goal is: no partition table reading in the kernel.
Why not the faraway goal: no partition tables any more? They're annoying.
As soon as the kernel stops reading partition tables, user space
is entirely free in what it does. One of the possibilities is
then of course: no partition tables.
Why not the faraway goal: no partition tables any more? They're annoying.
Yeah, users and real life is annoying.
Guys, Linux is not a research project. Never was, never will be. If you
want to have a research project that does things the way people think they
should be done (as opposed to real life and being practical), look at Hurd
and look at a lot of other projects. But don't look at Linux.
Partition tables are a fact of life. And they are a fundamental part to
being able to parse what the disk contains.
Sure, you can do it in user space too. And you can do TCP in user space.
But some things are just fairly fundamental to the working of the system.
The disk and filesystem layout is one such thing. It had better "just
work".
Linus
From: Thunder from the hill <hidden> Date: 2002-09-02 22:35:25
Hi,
On Mon, 2 Sep 2002, Linus Torvalds wrote:
On Mon, 2 Sep 2002, Thunder from the hill wrote:
quoted
Why not the faraway goal: no partition tables any more? They're annoying.
Guys, Linux is not a research project.
Partition tables are a fact of life.
Linus, can you spell "faraway"? I wasn't talking about kicking
partitioning code from Linux 2.5, I was talking about inventing a better
way in 2010.
Thunder
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