Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2006 15:50:44 -0500 From: Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: absolute vs. relative offsets in disklabel Message-ID: <20060731205043.GD63872@dan.emsphone.com> In-Reply-To: <20060731203213.GA75233@hades.panopticon> References: <20060731203213.GA75233@hades.panopticon>
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In the last episode (Aug 01), Dmitry Marakasov said: > Recent `disklabel differences FreeBSD, DragonFly' thread gave me a > thought - why do we have absolute offsets in disklabel? AFAIK, on > NetBSD and OpenBSD, label is not necessarily located `near' > filesystems stored in it's partitions - and even disklabel utility > shows absolute offsets (with 'c' covering entire device). FreeBSD, > however, seem to step far away from that standart - 8 partitions > instead of 16, label located in the beginning of a partition, > bsdlabel shows relative offsets. Now I wonder if there are any > reasons for offsets to be actually absolute? There are many weighty > arguments for relative offsets: I asked this question a few years ago after having problems dd'ing a FreeBSD installation from one disk to another, and the answer was "it's always been that way" :) It shouldn't be too hard to have the code autodetect whether the offsets are relative or absolute by looking at what the 'c' partition's offset is. -- Dan Nelson dnelson@allantgroup.com
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