From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Aug 24 15:41:11 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from apollo.backplane.com (apollo.backplane.com [209.157.86.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D83F11525D for ; Tue, 24 Aug 1999 15:41:09 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dillon@apollo.backplane.com) Received: (from dillon@localhost) by apollo.backplane.com (8.9.3/8.9.1) id PAA18980; Tue, 24 Aug 1999 15:37:52 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dillon) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 15:37:52 -0700 (PDT) From: Matthew Dillon Message-Id: <199908242237.PAA18980@apollo.backplane.com> To: FreeBSD Hackers List Subject: Possibility of increasing default MAXPARTITIONS from 8 to 16 Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I don't know about all of you, but for the last few years I've been running out of partitions! It's even worse with today's big disks. The last disk I installed I had to resort to using two fdisk slices on a single disk: apollo:/usr/src/sys# df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/da0s1a 127023 52817 64045 45% / /dev/da0s1d 127023 9035 107827 8% /var /dev/da0s1e 127023 314 116548 0% /var/tmp /dev/da0s1f 1016303 435952 499047 47% /usr /dev/da0s1g 126322 17545 98672 15% /var/log /dev/da0s2a 1524463 631822 770684 45% /archive /dev/da0s2d 3048942 1670121 1134906 60% /src /dev/da0s2e 5541549 1616954 3481272 32% /FreeBSD /dev/da0s2f 2032623 861297 1008717 46% /images /dev/da0s2g 3048942 243147 2561880 9% /usr/obj What I would really like to do is to increase the number of partitions allowed in a disklabel. I really dislike having to mess with fdisk. The system defaults to 8. sys/diskslice.h seems to imply that you can compile up a kernel with a higher number. The partition structure with 8 partitions eats 276 bytes. With 16 partitions it eats 404 bytes. I assume that anything under 512 bytes is safe, and possibly even more (how much does a UFS filesystem ignore?) The structure appears to be backwards compatible. The question I am putting to the group is whether it is "time" for us, with today's large disks, to increase the system-compiled default from 8 to 16 partitions. Instead of a-h we would have a-p -Matt To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message