Subject: Re: wedges and what does that mean?
To: Johnny Billquist <>
From: Bill Studenmund <>
List: current-users
Date: 09/05/2006 11:15:04
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

> So, what are you saying?
> Are wedges just partitions with another name, or is there really a=20
> difference?
> The actual width of the size and offset is hardly a reason to say it's=20
> different. Is the information about wedges not stored on the disk? How=20
> do you find them in that case?
> I'm probably dense, but this answer made it look no different from a=20
> partition, except the fact that they were 64-bit values. Which is nice,=
> but it don't really make them any different.

Most of the differences are conceptual.

The thing about our partitions is that they really really are entries in a=
struct disklabel. And struct disklabel is an on-disk format. So there's no=
way to change "partition"s without changing the on-disk format.

Thus a conceptual change to get us out of the difficulty.

wedges are partitions separated from the partitioning scheme that defined=
them. So you don't need a struct disklabel, or struct part_map_entry, or=20
any other struct.

Since there's a disconnect between the on-disk representation and the=20
in-kernel one, you can map anything into a wedge.

Another part of the conceptual plan is that we move partition reading out=
of the kernel into userland. The kernel only NEEDS to be able to find the=
root partition, then userland can find all the rest. As a convenience, you=
can (according to the plan) add support for different partitioning schemes=
in the kernel.

We aren't there yet, and things don't work according to the plan. But=20
we're getting there. :-)

Take care,


Content-Type: application/pgp-signature
Content-Disposition: inline

Version: GnuPG v1.4.3 (NetBSD)