On 21 Jun 1998, Georges Heinesch wrote:

> > On my system (using the above mentioned names in mountlist or RDB),
> > the corresponding lines look like this:
> >    Mounted disks:
> >    Unit      Size    Used    Free Full Errs   Status   Name
> >    BSDROOT:   48M   16731   33312  33%   0  Read/Write BFFSa
> >    BSDUSR:   897M  674565  244440  73%   0  Read/Write BFFSb
> 
> Do you only use 3 partitions?
> /, swap and /usr?

For that harddisk, yes. I have 'var' as a subdirectory of '/' and 'home' as
a subdirectory of '/usr'. This gives me the best flexibility without
running into disk space problems on some partitions while wasting too much
disk capacity for other partitions, that will probably never be completely
filled. (I have an additional partition for data files on another disk.)
But this is for a standalone system which is only used by me. In a real
multiuser environment, I would do these things in a different way.

> > This field can be used to set certain options of the filesystem
> > concerning things like handling of symbolic links, case sensitivity
> > in file names, mapping of protection bits for group and other,
> > read-omly mode etc.. It is recommended to use BFFStool (included in
> > BFFS 1.5) to test these options and finally insert in the mountlist
> > the PreAlloc value displayed by that program.
> 
> What do you use as PreAlloc and Reserved?

I must admit that I did not experiment very much with these parameters. The
default value for PreAlloc seems to be 7, which means 'automatic resolution
of symbolic links' (1), 'case independence' (2) and 'respect UNIX paths'
(4). I find it useful to set also 'invert the definition of the other/group
permission bits' (32), because otherwise one gets settings like
'-rw--wx-wx' instead of '-rw-r--r--' and '-rwx-w--w-' instead of
'-rwxr-xr-x' when copying files from one side to the other. Therefore, I
use a PreAlloc value of 39.

The Reserved value should always be set to -1 for NetBSD/Amiga partitions
(see below).

> btw, what is the Reserved keyword for? I changed it to several
> settings but that didn't visibly change anything.

According to the documentation, the Reserved keyword is used to select the
partition to mount from disks with real BSD (or SunOS) disklabels and no
RDB. Since NetBSD on the Amiga does not write disklabels to the disks but
generates them in memory from the RDB information instead, Reserved should
be set to -1 which means 'no disk label'. (Perhaps, other values are
silently ignored, if there is no disklabel, but I'm not sure about this.)

> > If you want to mount NetBSD root partitions as well as other
> > partitions with BFFS, you have to install the BFFS filesystem twice
> > in the RDB:
> 
> > 1.) with identifier 0x4e425207 ('NBR\07') for the root partition
> > 2.) with identifier 0x4e425507 ('NBU\07') for all other partitions
> 
> Since you didn't include 0x4e425301 ('NBS\01') for the swap aprtition,
> it isn't mounted. Is there any reason why swap should be mounted?

I see no reason to mount swap, as it does not contain any usable files.
And I doubt, if an a attempt to mount it with BFFS will work at all.

Regards,

Stefan Hensen

----------------------------------------------------------
Stefan Hensen
e-mail: hensen@wpos4.physik.uni-wuppertal.de