Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 15:37:52 -0700 (PDT) From: Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com> To: FreeBSD Hackers List <freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Possibility of increasing default MAXPARTITIONS from 8 to 16 Message-ID: <199908242237.PAA18980@apollo.backplane.com>
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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
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