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Date:      Thu, 25 May 1995 13:57:05 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@ref.tfs.com>
To:        gene@starkhome.cs.sunysb.edu (Gene Stark)
Cc:        cs.weber.edu!terry@sbstark.cs.sunysb.edu, blaise.ibp.fr!roberto@sbstark.cs.sunysb.edu, FreeBSD.org!current@sbstark.cs.sunysb.edu
Subject:   Re: newfs weirdness...
Message-ID:  <199505252057.NAA27958@ref.tfs.com>
In-Reply-To: <199505251818.OAA11883@starkhome.cs.sunysb.edu> from "Gene Stark" at May 25, 95 02:18:34 pm

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> The sticking point for me is that it is just as wrong to newfs a UFS
> filesystem with a fictitious BIOS geometry as it is to newfs it with a
> 4096/1 geometry.  Using the fictitious BIOS geometry at least has the
> advantage that an integral number of cylinder groups fit into the
> partition, so you are not wasting a few thousand sectors at the end
> of the partition.  Also, the "real" geometries supplied by the drives
> generally have a nice relationship to the fictitious BIOS geometries,
> so that again you get an integral number of cylinder groups in the
> partition.

I have a patch for that "feature" which will go in after 2.0.5 is out.
For now it lives in sysinstall of 2.0.5.

The trick is to find a number in the general range of 2048..4096 which
divides into the number of sectors on the partition.

> In the absence of information to the contrary, for an IDE drive it seems
> to me that the best available information is that which is supplied by the
> drive.  Barring that, what is in the disklabel is next best.  I can't
> possibly see why a 4096/1 geometry is going to be uniformly better than
> these other choices.  Plus you have to go to extra trouble to avoid
> wasting sectors and getting the warning message.

You may waste a lot more space using the IDE geometry than by the 4096/1
because you may get TONS of superblocks for even very small disks...

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@login.dknet.dk> -- TRW Financial Systems, Inc.
'All relevant people are pertinent' && 'All rude people are impertinent'
=> 'no rude people are relevant'



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