Re: [Design] nested partitions: Unify grub_partition and grub_disk

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

On Monday 13 April 2009 23:00:37 Robert Millan wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 11:58:05PM +0200, phcoder wrote:
> > Ping. Is it ok for me to implement it this way?
>
> I'd really like it if Okuji could give his impression on this one, if
> possible.

I don't think I am the right one to ask, because I myself don't use any BSD 
variant any longer. So, in short, I don't care for myself.

As partition specifications are relevant to the user, it is better to ask the 
user.

(At least when I used GNU/Hurd with BSD disk slices, I preferred a, b, c to 1, 
2, 3. Something called "least surprising".)

Regards,
Okuji

>
> > phcoder wrote:
> >> I forgot to speak about another question: partition naming. I see 2
> >> possibilities
> >> 1) purely numeric unified naming scheme. It means that
> >> (hd0,1,a) becomes (hd0,1,1)
> >> On one hand mixed number-letter scheme is similar to what freebsd uses
> >> but on the other hand numerical scheme is versatile and allows
> >> unlimited nestedness. And I don't see why we would use a scheme
> >> specific to one of many supported OSes.
> >> 2) Every partition map is allowed to pick the name that it likes as
> >> long as it contains no comma. In this way we would need to keep
> >> partition-name parsing functions in partitition map modules. It means
> >> that this code would be duplicated. But this scheme is better in the
> >> cases when partition map has no numbering scheme but instead has labels
> >> attached to partitions. But in this case IMO search command should be
> >> used find the partition
> >>
> >> I personally would prefer the first way
> >>
> >>> Also an interesting question is how would "has_partitions" field be
> >>> handled in this scheme.
> >>
> >> Just ignored. It's actually used only to optimise some code out based
> >> on the assumption that some media has no partitions. Performance gain
> >> is negligible but if this assumption doesn't hold true grub won't be
> >> able to access the partitions which are really here. Famous example is
> >> a cdrom. Most people would assume that cdrom has no partitions. But on
> >> powerpc bootable cdroms use APM
> >
> > --
> >
> > Regards
> > Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko
> >
> >
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