Re: Daemon's Advocate article

[Chris Pressey <cpressey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 02 Mar 2004 14:17:40 +0100
Michel Talon <talon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
> 
> > Chris Pressey said on Mar  1, 2004 at 23:12:25:
> >> <extremely_contentious>
> >> 
> >> * Let's call a spade a spade - or rather, a partition a partition.
> >> i.e.
> >> 
> >> *BSD         The Rest of the World           DFly
> >> ----         ---------------------           ----
> >> slice                partition                       partition
> >> partition    N/A                             subpartition
> >                 ^^^
> > I think the N/A should be "extended partition".  At least, my disk
> > has four slices ("partitions" in rest-of-the-world speak), of which
> > the first 3 are windows, linux ext3 and linux swap and the fourth is
> > FreeBSD; and I can mount the FreeBSD (sub-)partitions under linux as
> > /dev/hda5, /dev/hda7 etc. (/dev/hda6=FreeBSD swap)
> > 
> 
> Not really, since "logical partitions" in the dos sense (or Linux) are
> chained together (like a linear chain) while the "partitions" created
> by disklabel are defined by a table at the beginning of the "slice" or
> of the disk. Hence there is analogy between subpartitioning through
> disklabel and logical partitions in extended partition, but the
> analogy is not perfect.

Still, since they are logical partitions, it's up to the OS to present
them to the user in some way.  Linux presents them as a (very shallow)
hierarchy (which imitates the slice/parition organization in BSD) while
Windows presents them as a flat list.  AFAICT.  I think this accounts
for the confusion I had about the differences, anyway.

-Chris