Date: Tue, 21 Feb 1995 17:55:53 +1100 From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au> To: obiwan!bob@uudell.us.dell.com, roberto@blaise.ibp.fr Cc: current@FreeBSD.org, phk@ref.tfs.com Subject: Re: ATTENTION Message-ID: <199502210655.RAA08777@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
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>>[slices] >1. what will it change ? Mainly sd.c and wd.c. The specialness of the 'd' partition will go away and you will have to use (e.g.) /dev/sd0 instead of /dev/sd0d. Almost nothing used /dev/sd0d (fdisk, sysinstall and benchmarks are the only things that should have used it), so you won't notice in normal operation. >2. how do we convert from the old system ? Simply compiling the new version should be enough to get ordinary ufs partitions working. The bootstrap will probably complain about 'd' partitions and may complain about MSDOS partitions and delete them from the in-core disklabel (partitions not within the BSD slice are not allowed). You can delete the bogus partitions to get rid of the warnings. I keep them for testing. To get at (primary) MSDOS slices that are no longer in the label, you have to edit /etc/fstab to give the new name of the slice, e.g., /dev/sd0s1 (DOSpartition 1). If you want new features such as more than one BSD slices, then you have to edit /etc/fstab some more and /dev/MAKEDEV to create the new devices (there are too many possible devices to create by default and I haven't added nonstandard cases yet). If the second BSD slice is /dev/sd0s3, then you would need devices /dev/[r]sd0s3[a-h]. Booting from BSD slices after the first is currently not supported. >3. if someone wants to stay as is it now, will it be possible or > will slices be mandatory ? The slice code will be mandatory but you won't see much evidence of it. However, there is a lot of compatibility cruft to make the old devices work transparently. I'd like this to go away soon. Devices would have to be named differently in /etc/fstab and in config files, e.g., /dev/sd0s2a instead of /dev/sd0a if /dev/sd0s2 is the first BSD slice. (The partitions on the first BSD slice in the DOSpartition table are aliased to /dev/[r]sd0[a-h]. This requires confusing minor numbering: name slice bits in minor DOSpartition number [r]sd0[a-h] 0 << 21 aliased [r]sd0[c] 1 << 21 none [r]sd0s1[a-h] 2 << 21 1 .... [r]sd0s4[a-h] 5 << 21 4). >4. will it require to have a DOS partition or not. ? Not necessary. The case BSD on the whole disk hasn't been tested much. I think it works with a correct DOSpartition table (covering the whole disk) or no DOSpartition table (no 0xAA55 signature). Unfortunately, the standard bootstrap creates an incorrect DOSpartition table. This case will probably work too, by throwing out the table. Bruce
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