On Sat, 3 Oct 1998, Greg A. Woods wrote:

 * Not to mention that it would also fix the strange semantics of reading
 * and writing disk labels.  I.e. one would always be able to write a label
 * to the raw disk, and then instead of writing to the incore copy you'd
 * just tell the kernel to read it from the disk again.  Then you'd be 100%
 * certain that everything was in sync and there'd be absolutely no way of
 * getting it out of sync.

That's a matter of semantics in itself and independent of the 'c'/'d'
stuff, which, again, is not in the driver, but in the partition table.
Its roots are strictly in userland.

But yeah, it would keep things from getting out of sync.

 * Well, you still need to index the partitions with something, and letters
 * are good because there's at least 52 to play with.

Yes, but the disklabel will only accommodate, what, twenty-two of them.

Rewriting the disklabel size would be a major hassle.

 * 
 * However using the current FS_* flags a lot more would be good.  It would
 * also be good to add a flag that says "read-only" which would be enforced
 * at the driver layer.  (I suspect you can't do that now because if you
 * did you'd hose yourself and have to reformat if you made the 'c' (or
 * 'd') partition read-only.)

Nah, not really.  The theory behind something like disks is that if you
can make it read-only, you can also make it read-write -- at least,
that's how it'd be done in an intelligent manner.

But there again, the FS_* flags would be cool.  For some reason, I thought
such a thing existed.


				--*greywolf;
--
Friends don't let friends use Microsoft.