On Sun, 5 Jan 2003, Jeff Flowers wrote:

> I following the instructions for adding a new disk to NetBSD
> as described on the NetBSD website [1] and it worked like a
> charm.
>
> I was surprised that I did not have to run fdisk and create a
> NetBSD parition for this to work. I was under the impression
> that NetBSD slices had to live within the bounderies of a
> defined NetBSD parition.
>
> This all implies to me that fdisk partitions are really only
> required on the boot drive because of boot limitations with the
> x86 and on non-boot drives, they are not required at all.
>
> Would this be correct?

That's correct. The "fdisk" partitions are intelligible to the i386
BIOS; disklabels aren't. Even then, I believe they're optional, that
you can boot from a disk with an MBR, but an empty partition table
(just like a floppy), but I'm not positive.

> Additionally, should it be okay to enable Softdeps? According
> to the NetBSD website, Softdeps is "still considered experi-
> mental, and due to the copyright on it, it needs to be enabled
> separately".
>
> [1] http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/misc/#adding-a-disk

The copyright thing is way out-of-date. The code is now BSD licensed,
and included in the GENERIC kernel. It's still not enabled by default,
but it's a mount time option (-softdep).

On the question of whether or not softdeps should be still be
considered experimental, I was engaged in a discussion in November in
news:comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc under the subject "[NetBSD 1.6] current
status of softdep". You might like to browse Google groups for that.
To sum up, it's not experimental, most users do have it enabled, but
it can't quite live up to it's guarantee of "never any file system
corruption" unless you turn off the drive's write cache, which kills
performance on ATA drives (yet the situation with write cache and
softdeps isn't particularly worse than with write cache and no
softdeps).

Frederick