From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Jan 24 10:10:25 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.9/8.6.6) id KAA04041 for hackers-outgoing; Tue, 24 Jan 1995 10:10:25 -0800 Received: from cs.weber.edu (cs.weber.edu [137.190.16.16]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.9/8.6.6) with SMTP id KAA04034 for ; Tue, 24 Jan 1995 10:10:23 -0800 Received: by cs.weber.edu (4.1/SMI-4.1.1) id AA12647; Tue, 24 Jan 95 11:04:15 MST From: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) Message-Id: <9501241804.AA12647@cs.weber.edu> Subject: Re: disklabel (1.1.5.1), partitions To: phk@ref.tfs.com (Poul-Henning Kamp) Date: Tue, 24 Jan 95 11:04:15 MST Cc: bde@zeta.org.au, freebsd-hackers@freefall.cdrom.com, kuku@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de In-Reply-To: <199501241750.JAA21155@ref.tfs.com> from "Poul-Henning Kamp" at Jan 24, 95 09:50:37 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4dev PL52] Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > Not all SCSI devices are thus translated? > mostly they are, unless the "> 1GB" option is set. Sorry, this isn't really a valid reason for lying about the geometry unless you can guarantee Adaptec ROMs for the house... my WD7000-FAAST controller (the works with 386BSD PL2 but not after -- I'll have to do something about that eventually) doesn't have this capability. I point at it not as a piece of obscure hardware (though it is that) but as an example of something that doesn't work that way that I can back up with ROM dumps. If you'll accept a more general statement, I'll say that the translation you suggest is primarily an Adaptec thing, and primarily for newer controllers from them, at that. > > Hold on! How about because the kernel should know the real BIOS apparent > > geometry for instead of making things up like that? > true, except we cannot trust this one anymore :-( Some IDE and SCSI > drivers get their "geometry" in CONFIG.SYS these days. Actually, most EIDE controllers get them from a modified system boot block installed by the OEM for the machine. Blowing the system boot block in that case really screws you up. I have a copy of the article describing this somewhere... > > No, no, wait! I have a better one... because you could just add > > descriptive text to inform the user of the physical vs. the translated > > geometry? > no. I don't understand... what's wrong with: Geometry CCCC/HH/SS (Physical CCCC/HH/SS) Instead of the unmarked numbers that it puts out now? > Has nothing to do with it. If you pass some of the weird geometries to > newfs it will become very confused... 32/64 works sensibly most of the > time. This is a bug in newfs, like the one where it doesn't create a lost+found, not a reason to bogify other parts of the system to hack around it. Terry Lambert terry@cs.weber.edu --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.