From: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
To: vherva@vianova.fi
Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 09:50:15 +1000
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Message-ID: <17714.51511.845336.721450@cse.unsw.edu.au>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, aeb@cwi.nl,
       Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
Subject: Re: Why aren't partitions limited to fit within the device?
In-Reply-To: message from Ville Herva on Sunday October 15
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On Sunday October 15, vherva@vianova.fi wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 13, 2006 at 09:50:49AM +1000, you [Neil Brown] wrote:
> > 
> > Hi,
> >  I was looking into an issue that someone was having with raid5.
> > They made an md/raid5 out of 5 whole devices and by luck the data
> > that was written to the first block of the 5th device looked
> > slightly like a partition table.  fdisk output below for the curious.
> > However some partitions were beyond the end of the device.
> 
> That reminds me of an old long-standing mystery I had with a machine that
> had a RAID-5 of three whole devices. 
> 
> I wonder if there's ever a change the kernel partition detection code could
> _write_ on the disk, even when there's really no partition table?

No, kernel partition detection never writes.

I can't imagine what could have been causing your very-interesting
corruption.  However as it was only demonstrated on old code and
cannot be explored further, I suspect we just have to forget it and
move one :-(

NeilBrown
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