Date: Wed, 23 Aug 1995 00:59:46 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au> Cc: alain@Wit401402.student.utwente.nl, current@freefall.FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Of slices and boot code.. Message-ID: <3753.809164786@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 23 Aug 1995 06:00:21 %2B1000." <199508222000.GAA20779@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
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> They seem to be quite consistent. BSD partitions are named partitions > and DOS partitions are named slices. The native partitions have to be > named partitions for political reasons and the foreign partitions have > to be named something different to avoid confusion. Well, perhaps we can indeed do something about this even so.. What if a "slice" referred only to an MBR entry, e.g. one of the 4 entries configured by the fdisk editor - sd0s1, sd0s2 and so on. A "partition" always referred to a subsection of a slice (a slice of a slice? gah!), that is something modified by the disklabel editor - sd0s1a, sd0s2d and so on. Note that this would hold true even for extended DOS partitions and such - there would be no distinction drawn for "BSD partitions" and any other subsectioning of a slice. Once we get a working ext2fs we'll only have the situation complicated even further as people want to deal with their "Linux slice" as a set of "Linux partitions". Drawing a clear line now will only make our lives easier then. As I said before, the compatibility slice only complicates things since it introduces these hybrid "sd0a" sorts of names and mixes them in among the "real" partition names. On my own system you see: Filesystem 512-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/sd0a 59454 30724 23972 56% / /dev/sd0s2e 2980222 2204714 537090 80% /usr /dev/sd0s2f 4357562 551324 3457632 14% /a /dev/sd1s1e 3858078 1891204 1658226 53% /b And it makes people look at that first entry and say "huh? it's not in the second slice? where is it then??" I'm still not clear on whether or not those last patches of yours will enable me to yank the "compatibility hacks" out of sysinstall. I surely would like to as it would actually simplify the code considerably! Jordan
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