From owner-freebsd-arch Tue Oct 31 15:15:32 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from mail.wgate.com (mail.wgate.com [38.219.83.4]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 81D0837B4C5; Tue, 31 Oct 2000 15:15:28 -0800 (PST) Received: from jesup.eng.tvol.net ([10.32.2.26]) by mail.wgate.com with SMTP (Microsoft Exchange Internet Mail Service Version 5.5.2650.21) id VT2YBCWW; Tue, 31 Oct 2000 18:15:29 -0500 Reply-To: Randell Jesup To: John Baldwin Cc: Warner Losh , arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Like to commit my diskprep References: From: Randell Jesup Date: 31 Oct 2000 18:19:04 -0500 In-Reply-To: John Baldwin's message of "Tue, 31 Oct 2000 11:31:23 -0800 (PST)" Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.0807 (Gnus v5.8.7) Emacs/20.7 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG John Baldwin writes: >> Before anyone asks, the biggest difference between my diskprep and >> Matt's recent changes are that diskprep doesn't introduce a new api >> into the kernel and doesn't pollute disklabel with functions it >> traditionally hasn't done. Matt's changes put functionality into >> edisklabel and the kernel. > >Actually, I would think that creating a virgin disklabel would be >part of disklabel's job. After all, doesn't it make sense to use >the disklabel program to create/edit disklabel's? Yes. And it should. Right now disklabel (and many of the other disk tools) are basically dusty decks - many of their defaults date back several eons. Look at the default partitioning that's set up (the values in /etc/disktab and the way it's used), etc. The last time an HD was added to disktab was 1993 and it was a 100MB Conner. The documentation for fdisk hasn't changed since 1996. Sysinstall sets the default newfs args to "-b 8192 -f 1024", even though there's a CVS note from 1999 that says The default is still "-b 8192 -f 1024" but my experiments show that "-b 16384 -f 4096 -c 100" is a more sensible value for modern disksizes. -b 8192 and -f 1024 (and -c 16) are still the defaults in newfs. You get my drift - most of these defaults are wildly out-of-whack for even vaguely semi-modern hardware. Admins need to tune all sorts of things in order to get good setups - the defaults are insane. Fsck has all sorts of brain damage when it comes to certain types of corruption requiring someone to intimately understand ufs inode structures and on top of that how to edit them in-place with crufty tools. I don't feel we should just add more and more layers on top of badly out-of-date tools. Fix the tools. Update the defaults. Add options that are needed. Don't create Yet Another Semi-known Way to do something. We have enough of those already. IMHO -- Randell Jesup, Worldgate Communications, ex-Scala, ex-Amiga OS team ('88-94) rjesup@wgate.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message