Re: rfc: test whether a device has a partition table

[Meelis Roos <mroos@linux.ee>]

LT> If you have unusual cases (and let's face it, they don't much happen - we
LT> have traditionally had _very_ few problems with getting things partitioned)
LT> then you should be able to override them from user space and have user space
LT> be able to tell the kernel about special partitions. 
LT> 
LT> And hey, surprise surprise, you can do exactly that.
LT> 
LT> Also, surprise surprise, pretty much nobody actually does it. Because the
LT> defaults are so sane.

Well, I have had difficulties with this twice during last year. Both
times it was a partitioned CD. One was a Mac CD (IIRC), the other was an
IRIX 6.2 installation CD with SGI disklabel and EFS partition. I got the
first to work but never had success with the other (probably a user
error). fdisk found the partitions fine but gave hints of a different
blocksize (2048 vs 512). I tried to set up the partition with devmapper
(dmsetup create ...) but I could never mount the resulting partitions.
Perhaps it was a EFS filesystem driver blocksize bug, perhaps something
with my manual setup.

But I would not say the defaults have been sufficient for _me_.

-- 
Meelis Roos (mroos@linux.ee)