Re: newfs seems stuck in loop

[der Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>>>> Once the OS driver takes over, it can use 8-byte disk block numbers.
>> Well, it can try.  Depending on how recent the disk is, it may not
>> recognize 16-byte read and write CDBs (which are the ones with 8
>> bytes of block number).
> Well, the point was that once the OS takes over, you are free to use
> whatever sizes you want.

To an extent.  While this probably is not true of anything a VAX will
be using, if the SCSI interface is sufficiently "smart", it may
misbehave in various ways if you try to use CDBs it doesn't understand,
even if they'd work fine if they actually made it to the device.

>> You're probably going to be better off with the 10-byte [CDBs] [...]
> Right.  And actually, I was confusing the size of the request with
> the size of the disk block address (which you probably suspected).

You know me far too well for someone I've never met. :)  Yes, I did
suspect that; indeed, I almost just "corrected" you.  But, between
having too often made a fool of myself "correcting" things that were
not actually erroneous and some fuzzy memory from when I recently
looked at the SCSI command set for unrelated reasons, I thought I'd
better check....

>>> [...], all you need to do is make sure that the root partition
>>> (partition a) is less than 1G, and you are home free.
>> The boot partition, actually, not necessarily the root partition.
> That is also a trick.  Never thought of doing that.

Glad I could share the idea, then!

> But then again, I have never felt the need for my root partition to
> be more than 1G anyway.

_Need_, well, neither have I.  But, for some of my machines, the
advantages of keeping / on a separate filesystem from (say) /usr and
/home are outweighed by the advantages of keeping them together, even
when you add in the additional price of using a kernel with a slightly
unusual configuration.

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