Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2000 14:58:33 +1030 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Mike Smith <msmith@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Dedicated disks (was: Dangerously Dedicated) Message-ID: <20001121145833.K71779@echunga.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <200011200953.eAK9rtF11698@mass.osd.bsdi.com>; from msmith@FreeBSD.ORG on Mon, Nov 20, 2000 at 01:53:55AM -0800 References: <20001120192044.Q58333@echunga.lemis.com> <200011201031.eAKAVqF12141@mass.osd.bsdi.com> <20001120125647.B58333@echunga.lemis.com> <200011200958.eAK9wqF11734@mass.osd.bsdi.com> <20001120112719.U58333@echunga.lemis.com> <200011200955.eAK9tiF11715@mass.osd.bsdi.com> <20001120112301.T58333@echunga.lemis.com> <200011200953.eAK9rtF11698@mass.osd.bsdi.com>
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On Monday, 20 November 2000 at 1:55:44 -0800, Mike Smith wrote: >>> I don't think that anyone will remove it from the kernel... >> >> OK, the more this thread continues, the more it's looking as if we're >> talking about different things. I don't have (much) of an objection >> to removing it from sysinstall. If that's all we're talking about, I >> don't have any further objections. But I still want to have the >> facility in the system. > > The ability to create disks which do not have a valid slice table > will go away. End of story. That's not what Jordan said yesterday. >> I wonder how long the current Microsoft partition table has to live, >> anyway? Sooner or later people are going to have to move to LBA >> addressing, or disks will get so big that the partition table can't >> address them. Then, hopefully, we'll be able to use a more sane >> layout. > > Geez Greg. You really don't have a damn clue about this, do you? Not the slightest. Are you being insulting because you have no other arguments? > Or have you conveniently overlooked the fact that the slice table > already *contains* an LBA field? No. It doesn't seem to help much in the fight against the 6 chs parameters, however. Have you "conveniently" overlooked them? The fact is that if we set them wrong, the BIOS complains. That's the whole issue we're discussing. On Monday, 20 November 2000 at 1:58:52 -0800, Mike Smith wrote: >> On Sunday, 19 November 2000 at 21:20:43 -0500, Mike O'Dell wrote: >>> >>> having partition tables on disks is just as much part of >>> the "PC architecture" as having to deal with the unpleasant >>> ealities of BIOS. use the hardware, play the game. >>> deal with it. >> >> Fine, if there's no alternative. But you're ignoring the fact that >> there is. We get rid of the BIOS as soon as we can after the boot. >> Why stick with the disk layout? Remember, I'm not saying "let's >> implement dedicated disks", I'm saying "let's not throw out dedicated >> disks". > > Just so that some poor sap that searches on this topic doesn't get > swamped by your FUD, I'll answer this question *again*. I wish you would stop talking about FUD. > Because the mere *presence* of a disk with a DD layout in the system > - not the boot disk, not even a disk ever accessed by the bootstrap > process - can and will in some cases cause standards-compliant > adapter firmware to *crash* or otherwise fail in a fashion which > renders the system unable to boot. For some loose definition of "standards compliant". I'd certainly disagree with this interpretation. But in my experience, and that of a large number of others, this is a very small number of systems. There are also BIOSes which fail to boot FreeBSD at all because they don't like the partition number (some ThinkPads). Should we accept this as a fact of life and go back to using some Microsoft-compatible layout instead? On Monday, 20 November 2000 at 2:31:52 -0800, Mike Smith wrote: >>> Why do you *insist* on calling it a "Microsoft partition table"?? >> >> Hmm. I was going to say "Because it was introduced with Microsoft >> 2.0", but I'm no longer so sure. Reading the MS-DOS 2.11 source code, >> it seems that they didn't have a partition table at the time. Can >> anybody remember when it was introduced? > > AFAIR it was introduced with the IBM PC-DOS hard disk extensions; I > believe the format predates the PC and probably came from something > obscure like the System/34, or possibly one of the CP/M variants. Hmm. It's not impossible that it was related to the System/34, but I don't know that system at all. I'm pretty sure that it wasn't CP/M; by the time hard disks came to be partitioned, CP/M was all but dead. More likely, though, it was a new development. > Regardless of your bigoted outlook, it happens to be a platform > standard. Whether some long-retired Microsoft employee devised it > or not, it's the way that IAPC systems work. They also use the BIOS. Are you recommending that we drop our low-level kernel functionality and go back to using the BIOS? > ... every activity meets with opposition, everyone who acts has his > rivals and unfortunately opponents also. But not because people want > to be opponents, rather because the tasks and relationships force > people to take different points of view. [Dr. Fritz Todt] > V I C T O R Y N O T V E N G E A N C E Hmm. Greg -- Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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