Subject: Re: CVS commit: src/sbin/newfs
To: matthew green <mrg@eterna.com.au>
From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@NetBSD.org>
List: source-changes
Date: 10/10/2003 19:01:52
--eMP3JyRexyk9c0Bv
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline

On Friday, 10 October 2003 at 19:19:16 +1000, matthew green wrote:
>
>    From the man page:
>
>         In general, disklabel(8) serves no useful purpose on a vinum volume.  If
>         you run it, it will show you three partitions, a, b and c, all the same
>         except for the fstype, for example:
>
>         3 partitions:
>         #        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
>           a:     2048        0    4.2BSD     1024  8192     0   # (Cyl.    0 - 0)
>           b:     2048        0      swap                        # (Cyl.    0 - 0)
>           c:     2048        0    unused        0     0         # (Cyl.    0 - 0)
>
>         vinum ignores the DIOCWDINFO and DIOCSDINFO ioctls, since there is noth-
>         ing to change.  As a result, any attempt to modify the disk label will be
>         silently ignored.
>
> could this be changed to report an error rather than silently fail?

Yes.

This is stuff which is really old and crufty.  I would be happy to
return ENOTTY for this ioctl call.

>> Maybe all its names should end in 'a'?
>
>    Heh.  That's a workaround at the best.
>
>    I think an improvement on the -F flag might be the way to go.  It
>    appears to want to do the same thing, and the only issue is that it
>    wants a size specification, which I think would normally not be
>    necessary.
>
> i think it would be best if newfs Just Worked with vinum devices.

No question.  Do you have any suggestion how?  I suppose one way would
be to ignore errors if you can't get the partition information
indicated by the last letter.  Another, tacky one would be to
recognize the path name (/dev/vinum) and go by that.  But that's even
worse than the -V flag.

Greg
--
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.

--eMP3JyRexyk9c0Bv
Content-Type: application/pgp-signature
Content-Disposition: inline

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.0 (FreeBSD)

iD8DBQE/hnyIIubykFB6QiMRAtdcAKCTGrrz/MLb1GgGwUZH2kuq3rKpFgCdFp24
GBQn7oVU1+Aldazd9cowxVA=
=3wQ2
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--eMP3JyRexyk9c0Bv--