[Info-vax] Support of partitioning

[JF Mezei]

On 15-05-03 16:49, Stephen Hoffman wrote:

> It'll involve backing out the existing hackery, to start with.  
> Existing tools will need work, as well.  ANALYZE/DISK would not 
> currently know what to do when presented with the underlying device 
> rather than the disk partition, for instance.

Should  MOUNT (without foreign) and ANALYZE/DISK be allowed to work on
the physical drive ?

Mounting the root device would requirea "GPT" file system support where
I guess each partition would be instantiated as a file. Otherwise, VMS
shouldn't allow a user to mount the physical device (except as /FOREIGN)

Perhaps backup/physical should be allowed to act on phsyical deviceor on
any devices that are partitions.

ANA/DISK is an ODS tool, so it makes no sense to have it run on a GPT
disk device. Perhaps ANA/GPT or ANA/PARTITION would have to be created
to deal with partitions.

if MOUNT is allowed to touch the physical drive, then unmounting it
should not affect separately mounted partitions that reside on that drive.

Mounting the phsyical drive gicves you access to GPT data, not to
individual partitions.

Note that there should porbably be locks to ensure that you can't change
a partition by using tools that work in the phycal device  if it is
mounted by an instance.

Consider 2 non clustered nodes that boot off the same phsyical disk but
different partitions.  Node 2 shouldn't be allowed to repartition the
physical drive because node 1 uses it, but node 2 wouldn't be aware of
node 1.

Does GPT allow for an instance to write a "I'm using this partition"
flag somewhere so that other instances can find out that the partition
is in use ?