Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 22:14:52 +0200 From: "Poul-Henning Kamp" <phk@phk.freebsd.dk> To: kalts@estpak.ee Cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: GEOM loose end? Message-ID: <13473.1052511292@critter.freebsd.dk> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 09 May 2003 08:21:45 %2B0300." <20030509052145.GA595@kevad.internal>
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In message <20030509052145.GA595@kevad.internal>, Vallo Kallaste writes: >Hi > >Several times now I've encountered following situation: > >I have harddisk with two slices, remaining space unallocated. >There's FreeBSD system installed on the first slice, other one used >as temporary storage, i.e. both have disklabel and mounted >filesystems. >Now I want to create third slice for whatever reasons. I know that >it's impossible without setting special geom debugflag, so I'll set >it kern.geom.debugflags=16. Using sysinstall I'll create the third >slice and write new slice table down to disk. Fdisk(8) confirms that >third slice is there. The only thing missing is now /dev entry for >this slice, there's no /dev/adXs3. This /dev entry will be created >when I reboot the system, but that's not acceptable. Any workaround? Well, the loose end is in libdisk which is a loose canon. (Sysinstall uses libdisk.) libdisk was built to run in "installer mode", and it was written to be small. It was never written as a general disk management tool but at some point it seems to have become that, proxied by sysinstall. The very reason why you need to set a debug flag in geom is that libdisk sneaks under the entire GEOM stack when it writes its changes to the disk, and the kernel/GEOM has not been and will not be bloated with code to detect this hack. We _really_ need to revist the area of disk management programs, there is a bid out there called "libwhisk" which as far as I can tell would make a good foundation. Unfortunately, I don't have time to work much on this issue, just getting the kernel side and the basic tools (bsdlabel(8), sunlabel(8) etc in shape takes most of the time I have. Try using "bsdlabel -e" next time, it is not as hard as you might fear. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 phk@FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
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