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Date: Wed, 22 Mar 1995 04:03:48 +1000
From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
Message-Id: <199503211803.EAA21797@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
To: bde@zeta.org.au, phk@ref.tfs.com
Subject: Re: SVNET Meeting?
Cc: gibbs@estienne.CS.Berkeley.EDU, gibbs@freefall.cdrom.com,
        hackers@freefall.cdrom.com, jkh@freefall.cdrom.com,
        peter@bonkers.taronga.com, rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com
Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk

>> There will have to be a another stage in the boot for 2.1.  This
>> is not hard to implement, except for the dosboot and possibly the
>> netboot.  The dosboot and the netboot are already out of date.
>> The netboot lacks support for BIOS drive geometries (which is
>> essential for correct operation of fdisk and sysinstall) and both
>> lack support for BIOS memory sizes.

>Say what ?

Fdisk and sysinstall now get the disk geometry from the in-core disk
label.  If there is no on-disk label, then in-core label is faked and
depends on the partition table.  If there is an on-disk BSD label, then
it may have a geometry different from the BIOS geometry.  E.g., it may
have the geometry printed by the driver probe.  Fdisk and sysinstall
need to know the correct BIOS geometry to initialize the C/H/S values
in the partition table.

Bruce