Re: Partition IDs in the New World TM

Russell King (rmk@arm.linux.org.uk)
Mon, 22 Jan 2001 21:39:08 +0000 (GMT)

Andrew Clausen writes:
> But, for "well behaved operating systems", can't we do it this way?
> (For the dos partition table scheme, 0x83 could be our "file system
> type", 0x82 our "swap type", or whatever)

I think you're complaining about the partition IDs in this thread, and not
the partition "schemes" that Linux supports. Am I right?

Well, the Linux kernel doesn't really care about partition IDs at all,
except in one circumstance - to detect auto RAID partitions. Apart from
that, the kernel couldn't care. You could set all your Ext2 partitions
as ID 82, your swap as ID 83 and Linux would carry on as if nothing had
changed.

About the only user programs that know about partition IDs are:
- fdisk (its part of the partition table format)
- installers (to stop users doing stupid things)

--
Russell King (rmk@arm.linux.org.uk)                The developer of ARM Linux
             http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/personal/aboutme.html


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