Re: [PATCH]: grub: Partitions can start at zero.

[David Miller]

From: Vladimir Serbinenko <address@hidden>
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 18:53:35 +0200

> On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 2:30 AM, David Miller <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
>>
>> With Sun partitions, individual partitions can start at disk
>> address zero.  That's right, zero.
>>
>> This works because UFS and EXT{2,3,4} superblocks are offset
>> far enough into the partition that it won't overwrite the
>> disk label nor the boot block.
>>
>> I added an, arguably hackish, heuristic to handle this properly.
>> Basically if the OS device name does not end in a digit we'll believe
>> that a zero hdg.start value can be a partition.
>>
>> If anyone has a better way to handle this, let me know :-)
>>
> What about the way I proposed in thread on implementing nested partitions?

After some discussions with Vladimir on IRC, he agreed that
my change goes in for now until his nested partition work is
ready.

So I have committed this change.

GRUB works on sparc64 right now on the one test system I got
working tonight, a sparc64 virtualized Sun LDOM guest system.
In fact most systems should work as long as they don't have
"," characters in their block device OF path name.

I'm working on that problem now.