From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Oct 30 11:28:16 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from pike.osd.bsdi.com (pike.osd.bsdi.com [204.216.28.222]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9099E37B479; Mon, 30 Oct 2000 11:28:12 -0800 (PST) Received: from laptop.baldwin.cx (ether.osd.bsdi.com [204.216.28.196]) by pike.osd.bsdi.com (8.11.0/8.9.3) with ESMTP id e9UJRPf77661; Mon, 30 Oct 2000 11:27:25 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from jhb@FreeBSD.org) Message-ID: X-Mailer: XFMail 1.4.0 on FreeBSD X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2000 11:28:22 -0800 (PST) From: John Baldwin To: Matthew Jacob Subject: Re: Really odd "BTX halted" problem booting FreeBSD on VALinux h Cc: Matt Dillon , hackers@FreeBSD.org, freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.org, "David O'Brien" Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On 30-Oct-00 Matthew Jacob wrote: > On Mon, 30 Oct 2000, John Baldwin wrote: > >> >> On 30-Oct-00 David O'Brien wrote: >> > On Fri, Oct 27, 2000 at 01:24:17PM -0700, Matt Dillon wrote: >> >> I think that the days of the 'dangerously dedicated partition' are >> >> numbered. >> > >> > Not quite. We don't do slices on the Alpha -- in fact our slice code >> > royally screws the Alpha users as it isn't nicely layered and thus hard >> > to avoid. >> >> But dangerously dedicated mode isn't used on the alpha. All of this >> stuff is purely x86-specific. The alpha just uses a disklabel instead >> of an MBR. Dangerously dedicated stuffs a disklabel into an MBR along >> with other ugliness. > > Huh? This must be a semantic issue since alpha uses nothing but 'dangerously > dedicated'- at least in terms of how to use disklabel to create a usable disk > on FreeBSD alpha. It is kind of semantic. However, on the alpha it is hardly dangerous. Nor do we fake a MBR on the alpha (which is what makes it dangerous). The alpha architecture doesn't use MBR's, but the PC arch does. Thus, having a disklabel on the alpha is normal, having one at the start of a PC disk requires ugly hacks that break the PC arch, hence the difference. -- John Baldwin -- http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/ PGP Key: http://www.baldwin.cx/~john/pgpkey.asc "Power Users Use the Power to Serve!" - http://www.FreeBSD.org/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message