The case against LVM

Timothy Murphy tim at birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
Fri Aug 10 13:04:40 UTC 2007


Rick Stevens wrote:

>> > You get up to four primary partitions, one of which
>> > can be an extended partition.  Inside that extended partition you can
>> > have as many "logical" partitions as you wish.
>> 
>> I'm not sure if that is any longer true.
>> Can one have as many partitions as you like in /dev/sda ?
>> I had an idea one was constrained to SCSI's 16 partitions.
> 
> SCSI doesn't give a horse's patoot about partitions...it only knows
> device numbers, the LUNs inside the devices and the block numbers inside
> those LUNs.  How those blocks are used is up to the application.

I'm talking about SCSI under Fedora/Redhat .
There is certainly a 16 partition limit to true SCSI discs,
unless it has been changed recently.
I have a SCSI-only machine running Fedora,
and Redhat 9 and early Fedora Cores definitely only allowed 16 partitions.
(I haven't tried lately, as I got a second SCSI disk
so no longer needed a lot of partitions.)

Incidentally, the limit was actually 15 at installation time.
One could add a 16th partition after installation.
I assume this was a glitch in the installation code.

Do you actually have more than 16 partitions on one disk, under Fedora 7?

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland




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