[PATCH RFC v2 1/2] block: scan partitions for hidden disks

[Christoph Hellwig]

On Wed, Aug 19, 2026 at 10:12:50AM +0100, John Garry wrote:
>> It also is used for giving a handle to NVMe devices that we can't support
>> as block devices and for which we only want a handle to issue passthrough
>> commands.  For those attempting a partition scan is rather suboptimal.
>
> We could set GENHD_FL_NO_PART in that case (as well as the hidden flag).

I guess we could do that.  It still feels wrong, though :

>> As is in general doing an extra scan per controller when we know it must
>> give the same results.  Wouldn't it make more sense to just propagate
>> the partition table from the ns_head to each individual path?
>
> So you mean that we would have something which can clone the head gendisk 
> partitions onto the per-path gendisk by itering  >part_tbl and calling 
> something like blk_add_partition(), right?

Yes.