Troy Dawson wrote:
> Unless there is something critical that most people use, we usually let 
> RedHat deal with it and push out the fix.  Since they say they have 
> already fixed it, and it will come out in the next release, expect the 
> fix in SL 5.3.

OK; considering that nobody complained so far and that I'm happy with my 
fix, this sounds reasonable.

> Just out of curiosity, what are you really doing with this?  When you 
> say you are "extrating partitions", that doesn't mean anything to me.
> I can mount my virtual partitions using lomount, and get files off 
> them.  Or I can repartition the disk in my virtual machine.
> I've read the man page and the information about kpartx, but I guess I 
> just don't know when I would use this.  What specific thing do you use 
> this for?

A disk image created by virt-install contains the image of a whole disk 
(like /dev/sda), not just a partition with the filesystem (like 
/dev/sda1) -- there are some other data like partition table and 
optionally more partitions.

While you *might* get access to the first partition using simple `mount 
-o loop /path/to/image /target`, there were some cases where that failed 
for me, IIRC.

Using kpartx, one can setup a special block devices which give access to 
just the "partitions" from the disk image. One can consider this kpartx 
to an alternative to what kernel normally does when it creates 
/dev/sda{1,2,3} from /dev/sda.

Cheers,
-jkt