Date: Fri, 24 Nov 2000 19:57:02 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: fclift@verio.net (Fred Clift) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert), fclift@verio.net (Fred Clift), opentrax@email.com, stable@FreeBSD.ORG, obrien@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Dedicated disks (was: Dangerously Dedicated) Message-ID: <200011241957.MAA26658@usr06.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0011240931550.3205-100000@vespa.orem.iserver.com> from "Fred Clift" at Nov 24, 2000 10:11:20 AM
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> > > > > o The FreeBSD fake DOS partition table does not pass a > > > > > number BIOS-based self-consistency checks (it needs to > ... > > > again, 30 seconds in fdisk fixes this > > > I don't agree with this one. There is a checksum that is not > > valid against the FreeBSD created partition tablem regardless > > of what you do with FreeBSD fdisk. > > Are you saying that there are bioses out there that store the checksum of > the winX MBR and get grumpy if they dont find it? I guess it's > theoretically possible, but I'd not belive it till I saw it... The same > machine wouldn't run dr-dos, linux, os/2, beos, etc. I might understand a > bios being confused about boot1 only using slice 4, or perhaps being > confused that the MBR is _included_ in the only or active partition. It > probably wouldn't be that big of a deal to switch to using slice 1, but I > dont know if this would break other things. I personally haven't seen > bioses that are confused by having a slice that contains the mbr, but that > doesn't mean they dont exist. Just not on the hardware I play > with... And again, it's usually pretty easy to tell if your hadware > dislikes dedicated installs. If it works the first time, the system isn't > going to mysteriously stop working because of it later... It's a checksum. They include it in the "garbage" data n the area immediately following the DOS partition table. This means that they can just add their stuff in (_checksum_, not CRC) and balace the books, the same way the AA55 signature and everything before it is required to checksum to zero. > > I have yet to see a reasonable justification as to why a DOS > > partition table and MBR (or boot manager) causes any problems > > that can't be overcome. > > So, aparently asthetics mean nothing to you? You mean, if I have to choose between "it's pretty" and "it always works", do I cop out and choose "it always works"? ... > I personally get embarrassed by ugly code and kludges. I have > yet to see you 'refute', as you say later in your mail, my > arguments in another posting for the asthetic reasons that > people might have. I think that if you have a sense of aesthetics in this area, you would probably not be running on PC hardware. 8-). I look at the PC hardware, and the requirements it makes of the software that runs on it, as a quaint Swiss Chalet architecture. Now you have this modern family who is moving into the chalet they just bought, and they need another room because their family is really too big for a Swiss Chalet architecture building. When they add this room, should the home owners association force the addition to be in the same style as the rest of the chalet? Or should it let the family put up an addition using modern industrial cinderblock architecture? > Aparently the comleliness of the solution to a problem provides > no 'reasonable justification' to you. And really, I guess it's > no big deal. I dont have a neatness fetish for my own code, > but I know people who do. However, peoples sense of 'doing > things the right way' is a valid reason to keep support for this > in the code... On the contrary, all other things being equal, elegance should be the determining factor, IMO. But there is a reason that Frank LLoyd Wright never designed additions to houses, only whole ones: if you are adding to something that already exists, aesthetics _demands_ that you constrain your soloution to one that fits with the existing system of constraints already in place. In its own way, using DOS partition tables _is_ elegant. It fits with the existing system; it ensures that things work as they are supposed to; it eliminates an entire class of support problems; it enables the use of an entire class of tools which can not otherwise be used; it makes knowledge of the system layout more standard, and therefore renders skills more transferrable and more marketable; it reduces the amount of code needed to deal with variant installations; it makes FreeBSD more accessible to new users. All of these things are good things. If you are partivcularly bigoted against ideas inherited from Microsoft, too bad. If your complaint is about the antiquated C/H/S values, well, I will remind you that there is a 32 bit sector offset field, which has been filled out by DOS fdisk since after DOS 2.11, which you can (and should) use instead. > I have no problem with making this less encouraged for newbies > to try, for making it a bit harder to do inintial installs in dedicated > mode. What I do have a problem with are people (not necessarily you, I'm > to lazy to go back and re-read the whole thread again...) that seem to > want to remove the ability to have this work even if you know what you're > doing... You can always do this with your own tools. The question is whether it should be allowed in sysinstall. So far, it has been nothing but trouble. I think the accessibility to new users is probably the number one consideration. The more likely we are to destroy an existing FS on a user's system, the less likely they are going to be to try FreeBSD, or stick with it, once they have tried it. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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