Re: Question on MAJOR.H

From: Andreas Dilger (adilger@home.com)
Date: Fri Apr 07 2000 - 16:49:37 EST


Jeff V. Merkey writes:
> NWFS can support up to 8 volume segments in a single Netware partition,
> can have 4 NetWare partitions for a disk device, and all of these
> segments can belong to the same volume, or all belong to different
> volumes. A volume can be comprissed of up to 32 volume segments, and
> these segments can reside across several disk drives. One of the
> reasons it was done this way was to allow folks to easily "splice" extra
> segments onto a NetWare volume to increase it's size if someone added a
> disk to a system to get more storage.

What this sounds exactly like is LVM built into the filesystem. In 2.3.99
we have LVM as part of the base kernel, and it is also available as a
kernel patch for 2.2, and even 2.0 (although I'm not sure if the 2.0 code
is up-to-date in features with the newer releases).

Is your objective for the NWFS code to allow sharing of these disks
between Linux and Netware, migration from Netware to Linux without
backup/restore, adding new functionality to Linux, or something else?
Depending on your goal here, there may be better ways of doing this.

If it's just a functionality issue, you could always restrict yourself
build flat NWFS filesystems on top of linux LVM, which can help you do
all you describe (span 1 filesystem across several partitions, or have
multiple filesystems in 1 partition). If it's a "we already have this
kind of filesystem and I'm trying to keep it working" kind of issue,
then I'd take a look at how the LVM user-space tools do this same thing
(I think they just walk through /proc/partitions and then check for the
appropriate partition type - your code should be able to handle the rest).

Cheers, Andreas

-- 
Andreas Dilger  \ "If a man ate a pound of pasta and a pound of antipasto,
                 \  would they cancel out, leaving him still hungry?"
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/               -- Dogbert

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