Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2000 07:57:03 -0700 From: Cy Schubert - ITSD Open Systems Group <Cy.Schubert@uumail.gov.bc.ca> To: Matt Dillon <dillon@earth.backplane.com> Cc: Fred Clift <fclift@verio.net>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Really odd "BTX halted" problem booting FreeBSD on VALinux h Message-ID: <200010281457.e9SEvmk09019@cwsys.cwsent.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 27 Oct 2000 13:24:17 PDT." <200010272024.e9RKOHL07526@earth.backplane.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
In message <200010272024.e9RKOHL07526@earth.backplane.com>, Matt Dillon writes: > I think that the days of the 'dangerously dedicated partition' are > numbered. It has obviously caused much more havoc then people have > realized. We don't have time to fix it for the current release, but I > took a good hard look at the code and as far as I can tell the only > reason we *have* a dangerously dedicated partition at all is because > the disklabel code is too cheap to create a real one - it is just copying > the skeleton fdisk data from boot0 verbatim and leaving it. Disklabel > could very easily create a real partition - in fact, I think with my > proposed patch for labeling slices all it needs to do is exec > 'fdisk -I disk' to do it, and then generate a virgin label for the slice. The other reason to have dangerously dedicated disks is to support Zip and Jazz disks. For a while under 2.2.x or was it 3.x dangerously dedicated Zip disks did not work, requiring an fdisk label on the disks. During that period, I had to relabel all of my Zip disks with fdisk labels and subsequently remove them because of this. If we do remove dangerously dedicated, which I think is a good idea, special considerations for really dedicated disks, e.g. Zip and Jazz drives need to be taken into account. If that cannot be done, then making the change would have too much impact on Jazz and Zip disk users. Regards, Phone: (250)387-8437 Cy Schubert Fax: (250)387-5766 Team Leader, Sun/DEC Team Internet: Cy.Schubert@osg.gov.bc.ca Open Systems Group, ITSD, ISTA Province of BC To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200010281457.e9SEvmk09019>