"Groot" <differentialr...@disr.it> wrote:
> I've tried and failed to create more than 16
> partitions on OpenBSD. First of all I don't
> understand the difference between the operations
> performed by fdisk and disklabel. Is it that
> OpenBSD sees partitions differently? First we
> create an OpenBSD partition with fdisk and then
> with disklabel we can create at the most 16 more
> filesystem partitions within it.
Traditionally, BSD has used only its own disklabel(5). Unfortunately,
mess-dos on the IBM pee-cee set a competing standard, the "Master Boot
Record", with a separate partition table (and a lot of kludging to
support more than 4 partitions). While it was (and AFAIK remains)
possible to use the whole disk the traditional way (only a BSD
disklabel, as on e.g. sparc64), it has become common practice to wrap
the BSD stuff in a mess-dos partition, with the caveat that some of the
mess-dos partition entries are duplicated in the BSD label.
Thus, the BSD label is essentially OpenBSD's version of the structure of
things on the disk. But is an imperfect version: 16 partitions *is* the
limit for an OpenBSD label, and, of course, mess-dos partition
identifiers (which are more *ahem* fine-grained) are not used. To top it
off, partitions which rest within the mess-dos OpenBSD partition are not
necessarily represented on the mess-dos level (this would count, from
the mess-dos perspective, as overlap between partitions and thus confuse
a great many tools).
Then GPT entered the story to make the mess complete. But me'll remain
blissfully unaware of the inner workings of that particular clusterfsck,
if you don't mind ;)
It's no shame to be confused by this garbage. Almost all of us'd like
better, but for the above hysterical raisins, it's not so easy to make
it so.
--zeurkous.
--
Friggin' Machines!
