I feel like an idiot realizing block devices are just… block devices.
They just hold data.
Shocker, I know.
But it just hit me when playing around with LVM. I can create a PV directly on a disk. I can even directly format a disk with FS. Floppies don’t tend to have a partition table either. On the other hand, I can partition a partition. I can also just write a Tar directly to disk, like with tape. Or any file.