From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat Oct 28 7:58:33 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from point.osg.gov.bc.ca (point.osg.gov.bc.ca [142.32.102.44]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 960EC37B479; Sat, 28 Oct 2000 07:58:27 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from daemon@localhost) by point.osg.gov.bc.ca (8.8.7/8.8.8) id HAA16110; Sat, 28 Oct 2000 07:58:20 -0700 Received: from passer.osg.gov.bc.ca(142.32.110.29) via SMTP by point.osg.gov.bc.ca, id smtpda16108; Sat Oct 28 07:58:06 2000 Received: (from uucp@localhost) by passer.osg.gov.bc.ca (8.11.0/8.9.1) id e9SEw5n16217; Sat, 28 Oct 2000 07:58:05 -0700 (PDT) Received: from cwsys9.cwsent.com(10.2.2.1), claiming to be "cwsys.cwsent.com" via SMTP by passer9.cwsent.com, id smtpdX16215; Sat Oct 28 07:57:50 2000 Received: (from uucp@localhost) by cwsys.cwsent.com (8.11.1/8.9.1) id e9SEvmk09019; Sat, 28 Oct 2000 07:57:48 -0700 (PDT) Message-Id: <200010281457.e9SEvmk09019@cwsys.cwsent.com> Received: from localhost.cwsent.com(127.0.0.1), claiming to be "cwsys" via SMTP by localhost.cwsent.com, id smtpdXB9013; Sat Oct 28 07:57:03 2000 X-Mailer: exmh version 2.2 06/23/2000 with nmh-1.0.4 Reply-To: Cy Schubert - ITSD Open Systems Group From: Cy Schubert - ITSD Open Systems Group X-OS: FreeBSD 4.1.1-RELEASE X-Sender: cy To: Matt Dillon Cc: Fred Clift , hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Really odd "BTX halted" problem booting FreeBSD on VALinux h In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 27 Oct 2000 13:24:17 PDT." <200010272024.e9RKOHL07526@earth.backplane.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2000 07:57:03 -0700 Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In message <200010272024.e9RKOHL07526@earth.backplane.com>, Matt Dillon writes: > I think that the days of the 'dangerously dedicated partition' are > numbered. It has obviously caused much more havoc then people have > realized. We don't have time to fix it for the current release, but I > took a good hard look at the code and as far as I can tell the only > reason we *have* a dangerously dedicated partition at all is because > the disklabel code is too cheap to create a real one - it is just copying > the skeleton fdisk data from boot0 verbatim and leaving it. Disklabel > could very easily create a real partition - in fact, I think with my > proposed patch for labeling slices all it needs to do is exec > 'fdisk -I disk' to do it, and then generate a virgin label for the slice. The other reason to have dangerously dedicated disks is to support Zip and Jazz disks. For a while under 2.2.x or was it 3.x dangerously dedicated Zip disks did not work, requiring an fdisk label on the disks. During that period, I had to relabel all of my Zip disks with fdisk labels and subsequently remove them because of this. If we do remove dangerously dedicated, which I think is a good idea, special considerations for really dedicated disks, e.g. Zip and Jazz drives need to be taken into account. If that cannot be done, then making the change would have too much impact on Jazz and Zip disk users. Regards, Phone: (250)387-8437 Cy Schubert Fax: (250)387-5766 Team Leader, Sun/DEC Team Internet: Cy.Schubert@osg.gov.bc.ca Open Systems Group, ITSD, ISTA Province of BC To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message