From owner-freebsd-arch Mon Oct 18 13:45:58 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from ns1.yes.no (ns1.yes.no [195.204.136.10]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 93B9215138 for ; Mon, 18 Oct 1999 13:45:51 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from eivind@bitbox.follo.net) Received: from bitbox.follo.net (bitbox.follo.net [195.204.143.218]) by ns1.yes.no (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id WAA27732 for ; Mon, 18 Oct 1999 22:45:49 +0200 (CEST) Received: (from eivind@localhost) by bitbox.follo.net (8.8.8/8.8.6) id WAA79611 for freebsd-arch@freebsd.org; Mon, 18 Oct 1999 22:45:48 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from alpo.whistle.com (alpo.whistle.com [207.76.204.38]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 94B7115154 for ; Mon, 18 Oct 1999 13:44:41 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from julian@whistle.com) Received: from current1.whiste.com (current1.whistle.com [207.76.205.22]) by alpo.whistle.com (8.9.1a/8.9.1) with ESMTP id NAA90334; Mon, 18 Oct 1999 13:44:34 -0700 (PDT) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 13:44:34 -0700 (PDT) From: Julian Elischer To: Terry Lambert Cc: Poul-Henning Kamp , freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: The eventual fate of BLOCK devices. In-Reply-To: <199910181726.KAA03157@usr07.primenet.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Here's something that needs to be solved before Block devices can go away: Fsck on / in single user mode is presently done of the block device so that if fsck changes any blocks that are presently cached by the filesystem, they get updated for the filesystem. This ensures that should the filesystem then decide to read further data from the disk, that his data is consistent with that it has in memory. Changing this to be a simple char device will just not work correctly in the cases where there is minor cleanup required in the directories already loaded into memory. Until this is solved, block devices cannot be removed and certainly they cannot be replaced by char device. note: you need to corrupt the inodes in ways that they still appear valid to test this. (i.e. clri won't work) julian To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message