Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 11:04:38 +0100 From: Joerg Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de> To: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/sys/kern subr_diskmbr.c Message-ID: <20011210110438.A72135@uriah.heep.sax.de> In-Reply-To: <20011210070333.D88F33810@overcee.netplex.com.au>; from peter@wemm.org on Sun, Dec 09, 2001 at 11:03:33PM -0800 References: <20011209102129.F97235@uriah.heep.sax.de> <200112092015.fB9KFJe01121@mass.dis.org> <200112092200.fB9M0J660085@uriah.heep.sax.de> <20011209224310.A17244@dragon.nuxi.com> <200112092200.fB9M0J660085@uriah.heep.sax.de> <20011210070333.D88F33810@overcee.netplex.com.au>
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As Peter Wemm wrote: > Can you please clarify for me what specifically you do not like.. Is it: > - the cost of 32K of disk space on an average disk these days? > (and if so, is reducing that to one sector instead of 62 sufficient?) The idea of a "geometry" that does not even remotely resembles the actual geometry and only causes additional hassles, like disks being not portable between controllers that have a different idea of that geometry (since the design of this table is missing an actual field to specify the geometry). Incidentally, it's only what you call "intuition" that finally stumpled across the 10-years old Jolitz fake fdisk values. So IOW, it took the BIOS vendors ten years to produce a BIOS that would break on it :), and the breakage (division by 0) was only since they needed black magic in order to infer a geometry value that was short-sightedly never specified in the table itself. > - you don't like typing "s1" in the device name? Aesthetically, yes, this one too. :) > "disklabel -rw ad2 auto" is one form. That should not use fdisk at all. > This is quite fine, and nobody wants that to go away. Good to hear. Well, actually i always use "disklabel -Brw daN auto", partly because this sequence is wired into my fingers, and since i mentally DAbelieve that having more bootstrappable disks couldn't harm. ;-) As laid out in another message, i eventually got the habit of even including a root partition mirror on each disk as well. So each of my disks should be able to boot a single-user FreeBSD. > I advocate that the bootable form (where boot1.s is expected to do the > job of both the mbr *and* the partition boot) is evil and should at the very > least be fixed. Fixing is OK to me. I think to recognize the dummy fdisk table of DD mode, it would be totally sufficient to verify slice 4 being labelled with 50000 blocks, and the other slices being labelled 0. We do not support any physical disk anymore that is only 25 MB in size :). So all the remaining (INT 0x13 bootstrap) values could be anything -- even something that most BIOSes would recognize as a valid fdisk table. > It should be something that is explicitly activated, and > not something that you get whether you want it or not. I don't fully understand that. DD mode has always been an explicit decision. Even in the above, the specification of -B explicitly tells to install that bootstrap. As David O'Brien wrote: > > Its design is antique. Or rather: it's missing a design. > Jorg, why not just buy an Alpha or Sun Blade and run FreeBSD on it?? I don't see much value in an Alpha. Maybe a Sun some day, who knows? As i understand it now, the UltraSparc port is not quite at that stage, but i'm willing to experiment with it when i find a bit of time and documentation how to get started. I've got access to a good number of Suns here at work, and i think there are even a number of colleagues who would prefer FreeBSD over Solaris on them. If FreeBSD would had been ready for it, i could have tested it on the new V880 machine that was just announced recently. :) (We were the first one worldwide to show it on a fair trade here, about 24 hours after the official announcment...) -- cheers, J"org .-.-. --... ...-- -.. . DL8DTL http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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