Partitioning under Linux?

[Mitch Bradley]

MARTIN WOODHOUSE wrote:
> Hello All
>  
> ( C'est moi, the Ancient Mariner, again .. . )
>  
> Is it possible to partition a hard drive under LinuxBIOS?   I assume 
> it is, but I need to be sure.  If so, can both drives be made bootable?

Linux can create partitions on, for example, USB hard drives, and Open 
Firmware can boot from multiple partitions.  We don't encourage it 
because partitions just make all the procedures more complicated.  The 
documentation can easily become bewildering in the face of different 
partitions and filesystem types and whatnot.

With the current software, it is not possible to partition the internal 
NAND FLASH, which is the main storage medium that the children will use.

The OLPC bootloader is Open Firmware, not LinuxBIOS.  The information 
about LinuxBIOS on the wiki is somewhat out of date.  Strictly speaking, 
LinuxBIOS has never been the bootloader.  When we used LinuxBIOS, it was 
used for low-level hardware initialization.  LinuxBIOS depends on a 
separate "payload" program to do bootloading from disks.  In general, 
that payload can be a dedicated bootloader like GRUB or LILO, a 
stripped-down Linux system "Linux as Bootloader", or Open Firmware.  
 From a few months starting in August of last year, OLPC used LinuxBIOS 
+ Linux-as-Bootloader.  Towards the end of 2006, we switched to 
LinuxBIOS+OpenFirmware.  The current scheme, beginning with the 
recently-release C-series firmware, is OpenFirmware with table-driven 
early initialization.



>  
> Cheers and love,  Martin.
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