Re: Adding support for HP Service Partition GUID for GPT

[Andreas Dilger]

On Mar 19, 2002  16:54 +1100, Andrew Clausen wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 18, 2002 at 07:03:05PM +0000, Richard Hirst wrote:
> >   HP have defined a Service Partition GUID for their ia64 systems.  It
> > is a partition with FAT filesystem, holding various diagnostic and
> > configuration tools (like compaq-diag, dell-diag, etc).
> 
> Any objections to having pairs of flags instead?  i.e. have a
> compaq and a diag flag.  If you set compaq on, it will also set
> diag on (unless, say, "sleep" was already on).
> 
> That way we get a few less flags...
> 
> So, we would have, presumebly:
> 
>       company: hp, compaq, dell, (award?)
>       type: sleep, diag

Well, there are at least 3 sleep partition types (dell, ms-apm, pheonix)
which makes it really ugly.  I think the "named partition type" support
is exactly for this kind of problem.  Define "hp-diag" as a GPT
partition type and be done with it.  Otherwise, you will quickly run out
of flags.

As someone else pointed out, the named partition type support needs a
method of listing the available types, and of course parted needs to
have an interface to it.  In the application that I wrote the named
partition types code for, it normally used the "default" partition type
(i.e. as determined by the filesystem type), except for rare cases like
compaq-diag or dell-diag.

Presumably, just like you have a "set flags" command, you could also
have a "set type" command to override the default partition type.

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