Alexander Dalloz wrote:
> Hm, no partition used but the device /dev/sdb? How is that working? Is
> xfs special in that way?
No, it's possible. There just isn't much of a reason for it normally.
As for how it works, it works how you expect. I don't know if mount by
label works, but mount /dev/sdb /wherever should just work. The kernel
will look for a filesystem on the raw device, and not look for a
partition table, and will find the filesystem there.
Unix and Linux are nicely "orthogonal" like that. /dev/sdb is a block
device just like /dev/sdb1, and none of the filesystem utilities need
to look any further. Since the unpartitioned disk is very similar to
a partition on a disk, the software interface can be (and is)
practically identical, and everything just uses that interface.
The problem with not having a partition table on a device is that it's
then only possible to have the one filesystem on that device. This
usually is only of use to Windows users or people who want to dedicate
a RAID array to a database [1], and they are served just as well by
having a standard partition table.
James.
[1] Said category includes me, at work, but on an AIX box with a LVM-
based RAID. On AIX, LVM does the equivalent of partitioning.
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