Some vendors added statistics to /proc/partitions.
Laziness on their side. Since they patch the kernel anyway
it would have been very easy to make /proc/diskstatistics.
But vendors may do as they wish.
This breaks some software, but these same vendors patch their
versions of this software.
Then some misguided people came and wanted this in the official kernel.
Bad. It is bad enough that vendors add pollution, but that good kernel
developers want to do this is inexplicable to me.
It only causes trouble, and gains precisely nothing.
In this particular case there are two problems:
(i) the format was changed
(ii) the content has become dynamic
Many proc files like /proc/filesystems or /proc/partitions may change,
but not many times a second, and most likely not without the operator
being aware of it. This means that programs like mount and fdisk can
read these files [1]. But a /proc/partitions that contains statistics
will change many times a second, causing problems for programs that
try to read it one line at a time.
My conjecture is that you were bitten by the latter phenomenon.
Andries
[1] The correct use of mount is to give an explicit type.
The correct use of fdisk is to give an explicit device.
Nothing else is guaranteed.
Shorthand versions work with high probability. But with a
dynamic /proc/partitions they work with lower probability.
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