Re: bin/49510: gpt(8) fails w/o drvctl and breaks sysinst

[David Holland <dholland-bugs%netbsd.org@localhost>]

The following reply was made to PR bin/49510; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: David Holland <dholland-bugs%netbsd.org@localhost>
To: gnats-bugs%NetBSD.org@localhost
Cc: 
Subject: Re: bin/49510: gpt(8) fails w/o drvctl and breaks sysinst
Date: Thu, 1 Jan 2015 20:49:20 +0000

 On Mon, Dec 29, 2014 at 09:05:00PM +0000, Christos Zoulas wrote:
  >  |  AIUI, it doesn't, same as stat(2) doesn't return the disk size. I
  >  |  consider this a bug.
  >  
  >  Consider stat'ing /dev/nrst0. Do you really want it to return the
  >  size? Or /dev/rcd0a, what's the size? Is it the capacity? Or the
  >  current amount of data written? What if it's unformatted? Or even
  >  on regular disks, the size can be iffy... If you return sectors *
  >  secperunit, are you sure you can write that many bytes (what about
  >  bad sectors)?
 
 tapes aren't disks; otherwise, it's the number of addressable sectors;
 the point is to know what range of sector addresses are valid, not
 whether writing there will necessarily succeed.
 
 It seems reasonable to me for an object that needs low-level
 formatting to have size zero until that happens.
 
 -- 
 David A. Holland
 dholland%netbsd.org@localhost