On 09/04/15 10:53, Theo de Raadt wrote:
If you have very small disk, disklabel will give you one partition. No problem. DONE. If you have ample disk, it will try to give you more partitions, because the split partition scheme is MORE SECURE. It will stepwise increase the number of partitions in use, using a heuristic that a lot of development effort went into.
The example I have is one of a cluster of about 50 small machines with 16GB flash cards each. Currently the alloc_big scheme is used by disklabel for these (as with anything > about 8GB, depending on RAM). On a 16GB flash card it will allocate about 17% of total space to /usr/src and /usr/obj. I have no intention at all of rebuilding OpenBSD on any of these, so I consider this wasted space.
I agree that such a use case seems to be very uncommon, and after reading the replies I withdraw my question as to whether there could be a useful patch to come out of it.
Building a patched bsd.rd locally for such a unique need is not a problem at all. I asked out of curiousity more than anything else, so I'm sorry to waste your time on it.
