From owner-freebsd-questions Sat May 10 22:07:27 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id WAA11969 for questions-outgoing; Sat, 10 May 1997 22:07:27 -0700 (PDT) Received: from iceberg.anchorage.net. (root@iceberg.anchorage.net [207.14.72.150]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id WAA11962 for ; Sat, 10 May 1997 22:07:22 -0700 (PDT) Received: from aak.anchorage.net (ai-132 [207.14.72.132]) by iceberg.anchorage.net. (8.6.11/8.7.3) with SMTP id UAA28433; Sat, 10 May 1997 20:04:52 -0800 Date: Sat, 10 May 1997 20:57:31 -0800 (AKDT) From: Steve Howe X-Sender: abc@aak.anchorage.net To: "Jay D. Nelson" cc: freebsd-questions Subject: Re: Installation Problems In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-questions@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Sat, 10 May 1997, Jay D. Nelson wrote: > On Sat, 10 May 1997, Steve Howe wrote: > -> > ->> 1. Some programs, as mentioned before, still don't work > ->> with the slice paradigm and need time to catch up. > -> > ->i don't know too much about slices. > ->can anyone say something about them. > ->they're probably cool, but i still consider them > ->non-standard goo. i assume they exist to partition ok - i'm remembering some things ... FBSD must use the same MBR as DOS, and due to the 512 byte space of the MBR, there is a restiction of 4 partition tables, which are used to load any of 4 partition entry blocks into memory - which are then used to bootstrap an OS on that particular partition. i believe this is all done by the BIOS up to the point of of jumping to the OS's first instructions - so things must remain DOS compatable up until the point of the OS taking off (since the BIOS does all the analyzing of MBR/partition entry blocks), which means the all bootable filesystems on the drive. so i would -guess- a slice is just an extra block somewhere in a FBSD partition that contains data for more "psuedo-partitions" that only FBSD can deal with. but i still don't understand why it was so important to have these extra "psuedo-partitions" at the cost of making things more non-standard. i mean - if you really wanted 8 partitions, why not just get a second hard drive? / /dos /usr /var isn't that enough for a 1 drive system? > Ok, I'll bite. This may or may not be accurate, but it's the way I > understand the world. In a sense, it is non-standard goo, because it is a > term used to deal with the brain dead method Micros**t had to deal with > large drives. DOS (cursed spawn of CPM) is nothing more than what used to > be called a monitor -- a low level mechanism of dealing with hardware. > Remember -- it comes from an eight bit world. So what DOS must think of as > a partition is called a slice in FreeBSD to distinguish the peculiar way > of hacking a disk DOS uses to overcome address limitations, from a more > rational method of allocating a disk into filesystems. > > It does have a limitation of 8 per disk. > > -- Jay ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sleep: a sign a caffeine deprivation ... http://www.anchorage.net/~un_x -------------------------------------------------------------------------