OFFTOPIC: New MBR and partitioning standard?

[Horst von Brand]

Dave Cinege <dcinege at psychosis.com> said:
> Isn't it about time the x86 platform supported more then 4 'real'
> partitions?

That is just a DOS limitation, AFAIU. Linux is happy living completely in
"extended" partitions.

> I'm getting really sick of this limitation and was thinking of sitting down
> with some peers, drafting a new extended MBR standard, then submitting it OS
> vendors.

The current partition scheme allows for further partitions via the kludgey
"extended" stuff. You'd have to stay backwards-compatible there too... and
that gets just too painful: You'd have to record the other (>= 4)
partitions twice.

BTW, there are several decent partition layouts, f.ex. BSD. Linux just
doesn't use any of them on ia32 (at least by default) to be able to coexist
with DOS et al. On SPARC it uses Sun's partition scheme, etc. I suspect
this was one of the factors that made Linux the most popular free OS, not
one of the *BSDs.
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                       mailto:vonbrand at inf.utfsm.cl
Departamento de Informatica                     Fono: +56 32 654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria              +56 32 654239
Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile                Fax:  +56 32 797513