On Thu, 15 Nov 2012, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
In message <alpine.bsf.2.00.1211142231420.58...@wonkity.com>,
Warren Block <wbl...@wonkity.com> wrote:
On Wed, 14 Nov 2012, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
...
Given these facts, I am more than a little surpised to learn (or rather
just to realize) that the good old traditional fdisk and bsdlabel tools
do not have ways to explicitly specify minimum alignment _and_ that
these tools are still being distributed with FreeBSD.
There may be a way, I haven't bothered to look. As I said, gpart does
everything fdisk and bsdlabel can do.
Well, given that newfs has been ``fixed'' so that its defaults will
Do The Right Thing with the latest generation of (4KB block) disks,
I for one would like to register my vote for fdisk and bsdlabel to
either (a) be likewise fixed so that they also will default to Doing
The Right Thing (with the current generation of disks) or else (b)
be removed from future releases, based on the fact that (apparently)
they are now so old that nobody cares about them anymore and/or that
their defaults, when (foolishly?) relied upon, are likely to produce
Bad Performance, aka Bad Behavior.
It's legacy code, and that's always a tough call: update and lose the
legacy, or leave it alone and increasingly less useful. Since gpart is
available, there's little pressure to change fdisk or bsdlabel.
And also, please don't forget the other points I mentioned, i.e. that
the man page for fdisk makes several references to alignment on ``cylinder''
and/or ``head'' boundaries. Are those things even relavant anymore?
Have they been, anytime in the past 10+ years? (I am guessing that
there may be other similarly antiquated references to boundaries that
haven't been meaningful for a long long time also in the bdslabel man
page, although I confess that didn't even look.)
I'd say closer to 20 years. But again, it's that legacy thing. And
with FreeBSD, the odds are pretty good that somebody is still running
legacy hardware.
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