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Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:32:25 +1100 (EST)
From: Bruce Evans <brde@optusnet.com.au>
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To: "M. Warner Losh" <imp@bsdimp.com>
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References: <200910130043.n9D0hVCr089970@svn.freebsd.org>
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Cc: gonzo@FreeBSD.org, arch@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: svn commit: r198009 - projects/mips/sbin
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On Tue, 13 Oct 2009, M. Warner Losh wrote:

> In message: <200910130043.n9D0hVCr089970@svn.freebsd.org>
>            Oleksandr Tymoshenko <gonzo@FreeBSD.org> writes:
> : Log:
> :   - Enable fdisk build for MIPS
>
> I'm starting to think that the right answer here is to enable fdisk
> for all platforms.

Of course.  fdisk is MI except for bugs in it.  It should be usable
on any system to manage disks or disk images created on any system
that needs it natively.

fdisk certainly has bugs like assuming that the host system byte order
is the same as the target system byte order.  It fails on big-endian
systems because the target system byte order is always little-endian.
Its device independence was broken using g_device_path() just over 1
year ago, so it no longer works on disk images (except possibly if.
Older geom breakage is still handled benignly by not aborting when
fdisk is run on a system or file that doesn't support geom ioctls
(it even has a comment about this, but g_device_path() fails long
before the working code is reached).

Bruce