Re: Adding support for HP Service Partition GUID for GPT

[Richard Hirst]

On Tue, Mar 19, 2002 at 06:05:48PM +1100, Andrew Clausen wrote:
> Why?  Just have:
> 
>       company: ms, dell, compaq, phoenix
>       type: sleep diag
> 
> (And you must have exactly one of each, or none at all)

It forces a partition type naming structure on to companies that might
not be happy with it - HP _service_ partition, for example.

If you are going to insist on having one of each, I don't really see the
point in splitting it in to two fields.

> > I think the "named partition type" support
> > is exactly for this kind of problem.
> 
> Right.  It's describing the CONTENT, not some kind of meta-attribute.
> However, we're talking about 1.4.x here.  Maye this problem isn't
> worth solving for 1.4.x?

I'm very much in favour of a simple patch like the one I posted for
1.4.x ;)

In a way, it isn't even describing the content; I can create a
compaq-diag partition and then mke2fs on it.

> > Define "hp-diag" as a GPT

HP would still prefer "hp-service".

> This raises an issue: is it possible to detect these diag
> partitions?  I guess they are "just FAT".  They are identified
> purely by their partition type.

HP service partition is just FAT, with no other way to identify it.

> In this case, the "type" is really being used as a label.

Yes, except GPT has space for a text string 'name' as well as the GUID
'label' so we need to support both.

I like that actually, "label N hp-service" and "name N some-string".

Richard