David A. Gatwood  (dgatwood@mvista.com) wrote:

>On Fri, 29 Oct 1999, David A. Gatwood wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 29 Oct 1999, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:
>> 
>> > On Fri, Oct 29, 1999 at 09:56:06AM -0700, David A. Gatwood wrote:
>> > > Tried it, but:
>> > > 
>> > > 1. package tools won't work because of a disk space reporting bug.  df
>> > >    shows numbers that are ridiculously large and frequently negative.
>> > 
>> > This sounds like the mkfs/df bug that's been cropping up with every
>> > third new install to send email to the list.
>> > 
>> > Has this been fixed, Bill? Only in current? Reintroduced in 1.4.1? Is
>> > there a way to get sane numbers without re-mkfs'ng?
>> 
>> I installed the -current snapshot that corresponded with the kernel, and
>> everything snapped back into shape (and ps looked a whole lot nicer, too,
>> obviously).
>
>Well, I must have been imagining things.  I just did a DF, and it's still
>psychotic.  I don't see how it could be a mkfs bug, though....  The
>Mac-side MkFS never had trouble with this sort of thing until... well
>maybe NetBSD 1.3 or so?  I know I don't remember anything like it back
>when I first worked with it in... I guess it was around 1.1....

The Mac-side Mkfs code which deals with the on-disk structure has not 
changed since the days of 0.9.  The only changes that have been made 
since than that I know of are the ones I made, and all I changed were the 
low-level I/O routines (also used in the Installer), and some of the 
logic about how to get the disk parameters which are passed into the 
newfs code.

Basically, Mkfs was constructed (back in the MacBSD days) by grabbing a 
copy of newfs from BSD and putting a MacOS shell around it.  All I played 
with was the shell, and I don't think anyone has done a thing with the 
rest of the code.  At one time I did look to see if there had been any 
changes in that code compared to what is now used in NetBSD in the newfs 
command.  There were so many changes I decided the best approach would be 
to just yank the original code and jam the current NetBSD code in, i.e. 
just place the MacOS shell code around what NetBSD currently uses.  I 
never completed that project because I got caught up on other things that 
were more important to me.

I can easily believe that there are some low-level file structure issues 
with the MacOS-side Mkfs.  I have a much harder time believing that they 
exist in Mkfs 1.46 and not Mkfs 1.45 knowing what changed between the 
two, unless it's one of those boundary issue problems in the filesystem 
being created on disk.

Anyway, if someone would like to pick up and work on the MacOS-side Mkfs 
I do have a new MacOS shell pretty much designed and implemented which 
contains the I/'O routines for both SCSI and IDE.  Both SCSI buses are 
supported too, for those with the hi-end 68k Macs.

-bob