GEOM architecture and the (lack of) need for foot-shooting

[Andrey Chernov]

On Thu, Apr 07, 2005 at 03:20:33PM -0700, Marcel Moolenaar wrote:
> Once the OS has been loaded and has obtained all the information it
> cares about, the partition table is not needed anymore. Its existence

I completely agree! Disk partition table is not the thing supposed to be 
able to affect already booted OS behaviour. When OS is booted and read 
disk partition table one time, it must completely forget about disk 
partition table and use in-core partition table only instead. Even someone 
fill disk partition table with zeroes, nothing should be changed. It is 
the way like it always works. 

Rules are simple as that:

a) You may have in-core partition table with immediate effect and read 
disk partition table into it _one_time_ after boot.
b) You may _write_ (sync) in-core partition table to the disk partition 
table when needed or at reboot.
c) But you must never _read_ the disk partition table to the in-core 
partition table more then one time.
d) You may _write_ anything to the disk partition table at any time.

-- 
http://ache.pp.ru/