Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: OFFTOPIC: New MBR and partitioning standard? | Date | Sat, 06 Mar 1999 12:14:30 -0300 | From | Horst von Brand <> |
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Dave Cinege <dcinege@psychosis.com> said: > Isn't it about time the x86 platform supported more then 4 'real' > partitions?
That is just a DOS limitation, AFAIU. Linux is happy living completely in "extended" partitions.
> I'm getting really sick of this limitation and was thinking of sitting down > with some peers, drafting a new extended MBR standard, then submitting it OS > vendors.
The current partition scheme allows for further partitions via the kludgey "extended" stuff. You'd have to stay backwards-compatible there too... and that gets just too painful: You'd have to record the other (>= 4) partitions twice.
BTW, there are several decent partition layouts, f.ex. BSD. Linux just doesn't use any of them on ia32 (at least by default) to be able to coexist with DOS et al. On SPARC it uses Sun's partition scheme, etc. I suspect this was one of the factors that made Linux the most popular free OS, not one of the *BSDs. -- Dr. Horst H. von Brand mailto:vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl Departamento de Informatica Fono: +56 32 654431 Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria +56 32 654239 Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile Fax: +56 32 797513
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