On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 12:17 PM, leon zadorin<leonleo...@gmail.com> wrote: > Perhaps, *indeed*, I am not looking in *all* of the right places and > so in the meantime (as I will be looking more into the rest of the > fsck_ffs code when I get more time), I thought I'd hack up a quick > empirical scenario: svnd an image, plonk newfs on c partition then > clobber the starting 16k and see if fsck firstly detects bad > superblock and then recovers ok... > > ... and the tests appear to indicate that it does actually work.
If you had done this with non-default values for newfs and superblock locations you would not be so lucky. > I guess, if one definitively decided to reserve the 'c' partition for > special purposes, then instead of vnconfig caveat's section going into > detailed explanations/assertions as to why a given use of 'c' > partition would *not* work point blank (w/o testing such assertions) > it would rather be more succinct to state something like: "The 'c' > partition is reserved for non file-system use only. Consequently the > results of applying a file-system directly onto 'c' partition are > undefined." ... the 'undefined' being the keyword here (as opposed to > stating that it will *not* work, when in some cases it appears to work > just fine) -- thus allowing for practical observations to vary w/o any > point of contention w.r.t. man pages assertions. appearing to work sometimes is a special case of not working. it doesn't mean it is working.
