Re: Question on Flags

[Sven Luther]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 08:54:35AM -0700, Carey Bitterfield wrote:
> I am using parted on a ia64 machine.  I am testing out
> multiple flag assignments on a reiser partition. 
> Parted indicates that the following flags are
> available to be set: boot/raid/lvm/hp-service.  For
> example, I can set raid successfully but when I follow
> up with setting the lvm flag, this causes the raid
> flag to be cleared.  This sequence occurs no matter
> what combination of flags are used.  Any information
> would be most appreciated.

Well, those are not really flags, well at least for raid/lvm, don't know about
the others, but translate to partition types.

So, the lvm flag is saved to disk as whatever partition type is used for lvm,
and the same goes for raid. This means that both flags cannot be active at the
same time, obviously.

The real solution to this is to have a better API for these kind of stuff, my
idea is to have different set of information about partitions :

  flags -> real flags, which can be toggled.

  partition types -> don't abuse the flags for this anymore, and also make the
  partition type explicit in the interface, as firmware may care about those
  while booting.

  partition data -> other kind of "flags" with data attached. I don't know
  about this, but amiga partition's "boot priority" come to mind. We should
  have data of numerical, string, and so on types. This could be a generic
  thing which could include standard boolean fields (flags) and partition
  types.

Any comment on this ?

Friendly,

Sven Luther