On 30/03/2007 9:22 AM, Jerry McAllister wrote:
On Fri, Mar 30, 2007 at 08:07:23AM +1000, Antony Mawer wrote:
...
Is it important to use 16 as the offset still, or is this a historical
piece of information that is no longer relevant? Or is this is a bug in
disklabel that should be fixed?
As I indicated in another post in this thread, it appears to
be vestigial. I have never used it for a bsdlabel(disklabel)
being done on a slice - since 1998.
I just went back and re-read your other messages in the thread. I must
have glossed over that part of them - my apologies! I too looked at my
sysinstall-created labels, and they were all at offset of 0.
I actually started writing my own partitioning/labelling tool based on
libdisk, as part of a custom install CD I was building, but discovered
that it did not support non-disk devices (eg. gmirror)... I started
looking at trying to hack support into libdisk to do so (and made some
success), but in the end decided that it was probably a task better
suited for someone that knows libdisk better than I...
As a result I went back to looking at fdisk/bsdlabel to see what I could
do using them instead...
There seems to be a lot of left over stuff in the documentation and
man pages for fdisk and bsdlabel (and disk formatting, partitioning
and booting in general). Someone made a pass at cleaning them up
about 6 years ago and that helped, but it could stand to be done some
more. If I felt knowledgeable enough, I would take a whack at it.
But there are too many holes (not wholes) in my knowledge. I would
guess from posts in the list that a lot of people are in that position -
knowing a bunch of it, but not quite enough to be authoratative about it.
I have written several long replies to questions on this list that
could be the basis for FAQs or HowTo-s, but they still leave a lot
of things out and generalize or slide over lots of other things for
the sake of convenience, avoiding confusing a newbie and/or not being
sure about all the details.
I can attest to that -- I would love to see a clear, newbie friendly
explanation on disk geometry, and why it is/isn't relevant in this day
and age. The big scary warnings sysinstall likes to throw up made me
think it must have some significance, but from days of
searching/reading, the general gist I came up with is that geometry was
a largely obsolete concept (as most things use LBA for addressing,
including /boot/mbr from what I could tell), largely only relevant if
you have other operating systems on the drive, in which case all OSes
needed to agree on the drive geometry in order for the fdisk slice table
to make any sense to all of them...
In that case, can anyone comment with any knowledge if geometry
"fix-ups" are only necessary if the drive is shared with non-FreeBSD
operating systems? Or are they important for a drive (non-dangerously
dedicated) with just a single FreeBSD slice on it?
If they are needed, should some of the sysinstall magic be added to the
command line fdisk tool as well (as an option), so it can perform the
same modifications if it detects non-sane BIOS C/H/S values?
--Antony
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