Hitting partition limit in Beaglebone black Linux kernel

At work I was recently hit with the partition limit of 8 partitions. It was quite strange and debugging for hours with the kernel dmesg showing only 8 partitions being detected but lsblk and fdisk showing all the remaining partitions I was puzzled. Due the kernel not detecting more than 8 partitions udev would not create the device nodes for the undetected partitions. Narrowing down the problem to the kernel and wondering if it is a bug I did a google search for partition limit in beaglebone. It finally revealed the kernel config to be CONFIG_MMC_BLOCK_MINORS=8 which was limiting the partitions.

Reference to the original thread: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/beagleboard/IJpym7xOFBA/Cb7JQNS_6KcJ

Thanks to Robert C Nelson for helping with the problem and Ankur Tank for posting the problem in Google groups and Superuser.