*BSD News Article 2084


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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!mips!mips!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!menudo.uh.edu!sugar!karl
From: karl@NeoSoft.com (Karl Lehenbauer)
Subject: Apparent cylinder alignment bug in 0.1 install
Organization: NeoSoft Communications Services -- (713) 684-5900
Date: Mon, 20 Jul 1992 04:17:55 GMT
Message-ID: <1992Jul20.041755.29176@NeoSoft.com>
Lines: 21

First let me say that we are very exited about the new release.  It is
a most impressive achievement, and places an incredible amount of
software technology into the hands of sophisticated users, sort of for
free.
Now then, it appears the size of the swap is automatically set at 10,000 blocks
in 0.1.  This causes swap to not begin and/or end on a cylinder boundary
on most systems, as noted by the asterisks printed next to the cylinder 
numbers in the output of "disklabel -r".

In 0.0, not having swap aligned on cylinder boundaries seemed to cause swaps 
to overwrite part of the filesystem -- at least this was the consensus of the 
newsgroup a few months ago, and, as a further data point,  our overwrite 
problems went away when we aligned our swap.

Unless this has been fixed in 0.1, the symptom will be weird overwrites of files
that are't picked up as errors by fsck (which makes sense).


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