What I also don't know is what should be done when you get an
incoherent view of the disk. Trust the linux-side ? Sounded like the
simplest way to do things... I don't see how panicing at such an
early point would help, for instance.
Panic'ing certainly doesn't help, but printing huge amounts of warnings
is definitely in order. :-)
The rc scripts might also want to be rewritten to test for this case and
avoid mounting things read-write if there's known conflicts in partition
table.
If you want to play safe, all decent OSes documentations recommend to
use their own fdisk-like program to edit the area of the disk they're
concerned about: use linux's fdisk for linux partitions; use
OpenBSD's fdisk for OpenBSD partitions.
That's sensible advice: as much as it would be convenient to have one
single program that would deal with all partitioning schemes, it is a
maintenance nightmare. Who would like to be in charge of synching
linux/netbsd/ freebsd/openbsd fdisk so that it keeps in tune with all
those OSes...
True, but all of the fdisk-like programs have to allocate from the same
free space, so there has to be at least a certain amount of syncing
between the multiple OS partition labels.
It's basically a hard problem.
- Ted
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/