From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Nov 15 12:13:54 2012 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [69.147.83.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DB629435 for ; Thu, 15 Nov 2012 12:13:54 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from rfg@tristatelogic.com) Received: from outgoing.tristatelogic.com (segfault.tristatelogic.com [69.62.255.118]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B38EC8FC18 for ; Thu, 15 Nov 2012 12:13:54 +0000 (UTC) Received: from segfault-nmh-helo.tristatelogic.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by segfault.tristatelogic.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id C0A5E5081D for ; Thu, 15 Nov 2012 04:13:52 -0800 (PST) To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Advanced Format Drive ? In-Reply-To: Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2012 04:13:52 -0800 Message-ID: <21632.1352981632@tristatelogic.com> From: "Ronald F. Guilmette" X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2012 12:13:55 -0000 In message , Warren Block wrote: >On Wed, 14 Nov 2012, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote: >... >> Given these facts, I am more than a little surpised to learn (or rather >> just to realize) that the good old traditional fdisk and bsdlabel tools >> do not have ways to explicitly specify minimum alignment _and_ that >> these tools are still being distributed with FreeBSD. > >There may be a way, I haven't bothered to look. As I said, gpart does >everything fdisk and bsdlabel can do. Well, given that newfs has been ``fixed'' so that its defaults will Do The Right Thing with the latest generation of (4KB block) disks, I for one would like to register my vote for fdisk and bsdlabel to either (a) be likewise fixed so that they also will default to Doing The Right Thing (with the current generation of disks) or else (b) be removed from future releases, based on the fact that (apparently) they are now so old that nobody cares about them anymore and/or that their defaults, when (foolishly?) relied upon, are likely to produce Bad Performance, aka Bad Behavior. And also, please don't forget the other points I mentioned, i.e. that the man page for fdisk makes several references to alignment on ``cylinder'' and/or ``head'' boundaries. Are those things even relavant anymore? Have they been, anytime in the past 10+ years? (I am guessing that there may be other similarly antiquated references to boundaries that haven't been meaningful for a long long time also in the bdslabel man page, although I confess that didn't even look.)