From: "Dialup Jon Norstog" <thursday@allidaho.com>
To: Michael Cree <mcree@orcon.net.nz>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-alpha@vger.kernel.org,
        warns@pre-sense.de
Subject: Re: Alpha no longer recognises certain partition tables (v2.6.38)
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2011 21:09:57 -0700
Message-Id: <20110316040630.M24051@allidaho.com>
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To the lists:

Pardon me for a userland-type question, but is this going to be a problem if I
want to mount advfs disks? Or even some old OSF1 disks (that have some quite
valuable GIS covers on them)?  Just curious.

jn


On Wed, 16 Mar 2011 14:23:43 +1300, Michael Cree wrote
> On 16/03/2011, at 4:10 AM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 2:06 AM, Michael Cree <mcree@orcon.net.nz>  
> > wrote:
> >> v2.6.38 boot reports it can't recognise the partition table on the  
> >> system
> >> disk on my Alpha and panics when it can't find the root device.
> >>
> >> It worked at v2.6.38-rc7.
> >>
> >> While I haven't done a bisect to fully verify I nevertheless  
> >> suggest the
> >> following patch as the likely cause:
> >>
> >> 1eafbfe Fix corrupted OSF partition table parsing
> >
> > That sounds likely. What does something like the attached do? In
> > particular, what's the printed-out value of the OSF npartitions thing?
> >
> > Also, it's quite possible that we should raise the value of
> > MAX_OSF_PARTITIONS. If I checked it right, the d_partitions[] array
> > starts at byte offset 148 in the sector, and it's 16 bytes in size, so
> > there _could_ be up to 22 partitions there. The fact that we had
> > defined the 'struct disklabel' to only contain 8 partitions is I think
> > from documentation, not a technical "there can be only eight".
> 
> I am not able to run the patch until much later today but I think 
> the  number of partitions is the issue.  I have three disks, all 
> with bsd  type partition tables, and the kernel sees the partition 
> tables of two  of them (they both have fewer than five partitions) 
> but the system  disk has about nine (or it might be ten) partitions. 
>  I didn't know  the limit when creating them some time ago and 
> assumed fdisk would  flag an error if the number of permitted 
> partitions was exceeded!   What's more it worked with recent kernels 
> until now.
> 
> I'll give the patch a whirl later (my) today.
> 
> Cheers
> Michael.
> 
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