From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat Feb 3 13:38:20 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id NAA02975 for hackers-outgoing; Sat, 3 Feb 1996 13:38:20 -0800 (PST) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.211]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id NAA02966 for ; Sat, 3 Feb 1996 13:38:16 -0800 (PST) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id OAA04374; Sat, 3 Feb 1996 14:36:35 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199602032136.OAA04374@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: And the winner is! To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de Date: Sat, 3 Feb 1996 14:36:35 -0700 (MST) Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org, karl@mcs.com In-Reply-To: <199602030805.JAA08481@uriah.heep.sax.de> from "J Wunsch" at Feb 3, 96 09:05:43 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > > and the companion "I want to add a disk and not do a disktab > > > by hand -- since I have a ZBR disk and don't KNOW the right > > > > That's still kind of rough, yes. > > Not as smooth as `disksetup' (presumably -- i've never been using it), > but you've got it more convenient, without vamping a disktab entry. > In -current, you could do: > > disklabel -Brw sdX auto > disklabel -e sdX > > If people find it useful (and there are no further objections than the > single one i've seen by now), i could also move this functionality > into -stable. What is the limiting factor on simply coding all the disk drivers to return either a fictitious (but always usable) geometry, or at a minimum, a total number of sectors for a device? It must be possible to return this information via ioctl(), and then allow the user to slice it up how they want. In keeping with the devfs discussion on the -current list, the total number of sectors ought to be available from both phical devices (this case) and logical devices (the slice/partition management case). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.