The case against LVM

[Rick Stevens]

On Thu, 2007-08-09 at 22:17 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Rick Stevens wrote:
> 
> >> Umm, AIUI the standard way of partitioning drives has no limit
> >> on the number of extended partitions one may create.
> > 
> > Uhm, not exactly.  You get up to four primary partitions, one of which
> > can be an extended partition.  Inside that extended partition you can
> > have as many "logical" partitions as you wish.
> 
> I'm not sure if that is any longer true.
> Can one have as many partitions as you like in /dev/sda ?
> I had an idea one was constrained to SCSI's 16 partitions.

SCSI doesn't give a horse's patoot about partitions...it only knows
device numbers, the LUNs inside the devices and the block numbers inside
those LUNs.  How those blocks are used is up to the application.

Yet more obscure info from Rick, your font of useless data:

The four partition limit comes from the original PC specification.  A
BIOS-compatible partition table that a PC can access without help (i.e.
some other application) only has space for 4 partitions.  In fact, the
BIOS can only boot from tracks 0 through 1023--which is why we have LBA
mode which buggers the head and sector counts so that the cylinder count
remains below 1024.

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- Rick Stevens, Principal Engineer             rstevens at internap.com -
- CDN Systems, Internap, Inc.                http://www.internap.com -
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-    If Windows isn't a virus, then it sure as hell is a carrier!    -
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