Re: 2.5.28 and partitions

[Mike Touloumtzis]

On Thu, Aug 01, 2002 at 05:24:37PM -0400, Albert D. Cahalan wrote:
> Alexander Viro writes:
> > [...]
> >> On Wed, 31 Jul 2002, Alexander Viro wrote:
> 
> >>> What the bleedin' hell is wrong with <name> <start> <len>\n
> >>> - all in ASCII? Terminated by \0. No need for flags, no need
> >>> for endianness crap, no need to worry about field becoming too
> >>> narrow...
> 
> There's just that little overflow problem to worry about,

Ummm:

-- stuff ASCII digits into u64 (or u32, or whatever)
-- if (still more digits)
   -- printk("partition too big to mount!\n")
   -- return error

How hard is that?

> trailing garbage,

Don't write garbage into your partition table.

> encouragement of assumptions about the maximum size...
> is that a %d or a %llu or what?

See above.  Use leading '-' for negative numbers.  ASCII has no
2's complement ambiguity issues.

miket