Date: Wed, 2 Dec 2009 19:25:21 +0100 From: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de> To: Jerry McAllister <jerrymc@msu.edu> Cc: Bob Johnson <fbsdlists@gmail.com>, Peggy Wilkins <enlil65@gmail.com>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 8.0-RELEASE and "dangerously dedicated" disks Message-ID: <20091202192521.0d1b1002.freebsd@edvax.de> In-Reply-To: <20091202180922.GB44108@gizmo.acns.msu.edu> References: <1789c2360911280928t1e6e7b06p707abc1131f82bef@mail.gmail.com> <54db43990912020730u6d43e0caib7cc32b5aa80b7ce@mail.gmail.com> <20091202180922.GB44108@gizmo.acns.msu.edu>
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On Wed, 2 Dec 2009 13:09:22 -0500, Jerry McAllister <jerrymc@msu.edu> wrote: > Good. Except that in FreeBSD land you are talking about a slice table. > To carry things forward consistently, the partition table is within > a slice and describes FreeBSD partitions a..h (and more now I guess). > Only in MS or Lunix land should primary divisions be called partitions > and then they are _primary_ partitions. To be most precise, they are called "DOS primary partitions". As far as I know, the need for them has been massively by MICROS~1 operating systems (DOS, "Windows"). That what FreeBSD calls partitions are subdivions of slices. A partition holds a file system (each), while a slice holds partitions. Those partitions could be compared to what MICROS~1 calls "logical volumes inside a DOS extended partition", allthoug that's just a *comparison* and not an exact equivalent. > But, even some of the fdisk and other documentation still mucks this > up and occasionally refers to slices as partitions. Maybe we can > come up with some new terminology like 'blobs' and 'dollops' to get > away from the problem. Borrow some artificially created fantasy words from modern KDE or Gnome application development? :-) An idea that follows your inspiration could be: (old) slice => (new) primary partition eq. DOS primary partition (old) partition => (new) secondary partition, alt. (new) subpartition comp. logical volumes inside a DOS extended partition But it would help to get at least FreeBSD's documentation consistent, even if it uses the non-MICROS~1 names for things (which is very fine for me). Note that the limitation to 4 slices per disk - we remember that we are talking about "DOS primary partitions" here - is grounded in the fact that MICROS~1 stuff doesn't seem to be able to handle more than 4, a legacy restriction from the past. I've not yet tested if it's possible to create e. g. ad0s1, ad0s2, ad0s3, ad0s4 and ad0s5 with FreeBSD, but it should be possible. (Because multi-booting PCs respectively their operating systems eat up primary partitions like coockies, often people complain that they can't install FreeBSD because it requires a primary partition as well. Mostly, people don't have 4 OSes on their disks, but the one or two they often have (e. g. a Linux and a "Windows") have already occupied adX0..adX3.) -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
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